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The origins of Cervia sea salt date back to the classic time; some people connect the. To the Etruscan presence, others to the Greek colonisation and, to support their theory, they refer to the ancient toponym of Cervia, Ficocle, which has Greek origins. Cervia is so connected to its salt mines that some researchers think that the toponym derives from the Latin word acervus (aggregation), which referred to the salt accumulation which looked like monuments. These salt mines, so important in those times to cause wars, became in 1959 property of Monopolio di Stato.
The decision, in 1998, to cease the activities pushed the municipality of Cervia to take charge of the mines by instituting Società di gestione Parco della Salina di Cervia.
The mine is recognised for its naturalistic and landscape value, for its being a wet area of international importance to become part of Parco Regionale Delta del Po Emilia-Romagna. In one of the basins of the mind, the collecting of salt takes place according to the ancient manufacturing system of Cervia: the mine Camillone. The traditional system “a raccolta multipla” is suitable for the difficult soil and climate conditions of the Adriatic: it is not a case that it was practiced only in Cervia. The collection took place every day: every worker divided his basin, the last after various transfers in evaporation basins, into five-small sectors. Every day, they collected the content of a sector and in five days, all the salt was  used  up. This  blocked the formation of the so called “amari”, such as potassium and magnesium chlorides, which need more time to crystallise and higher salt concentrations , difficult to reach at middle temperature in this area.

This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)