Urb-Ex Manifattura Tabacchi, Lecce

Themes:

• north & south
• above & below : the boss, the bosses, small gods
• machine & human needs : food, drink, breath

A guest blog by researchers from the LINCH Institute for New Connective History

It started with a cry for help - a cat trapped behind this wall at night

Nighttime made her frantic mewing appear close, but distance stretches in the dark. A hundred metres into the site, tripping over abandoned sheet metal, I find an overgrown clearing of pine and holm oak lifting old asphalt.

It looks as though nobody has passed this way in years, and despite the crying cat I stop to marvel at the abandonment, the claim made by nature to this vast urban quarter. The height of the perimeter wall is eloquent – shocking – and while the five-plus-metre reach explains the helpless panic of the cat, it speaks also of the immense value of this forbidden place.

I am in THE LARGEST tobacco factory ever built in Europe.

Factory perimeter dotted purple. Scale: total walled area approx 21 acres. The central area covered with solar panels is roughly equal to Lecce’s football stadium, pitch and stands included

Today most tobacco is light in colour - think Golden Virginia - and comes from China, Brazil or India. But Italian soil used to grow significant amounts of this plant, and generally darker strains. Their heavy scent lingers where old Italian men sit around to smoke cigarillos. It's a strong smoke that breaks me out in a nicotine-induced sweat, and occupies a niche market today.

But it was not always so. Italian tobacco peaked in 2002, producing a pack of fags for every human on earth: 100 BILLION cigarettes that year, blending dark local leaf with bulk imports. Such an immense scale overstretches the word industrial, and such production clearly isn’t comprehensible in terms of abstract number. In fact, it takes me several return visits just to walk this whole factory. Over days following my cat-chasing adventure I cover miles on foot, following roads and railway through a site that once roared with forklifts and diesel trains. I explore not just one huge building, but a repeating sequence of vast spans: staircases A, B and C leading to modular stacks of contained cuboid space.

And if it takes a lot of walking to get a feel for scale, it takes me plenty of listening to understand how tobacco fitted into Salentine history and culture. An ex-employee of this place immediately recognises how the cat got through the wall; he laughs and tells me it was a preferred route for smuggling finished cigarettes off-site. This walled compound was a tax haven, the State imposing cigarette duty outside... so apparently you could have twice the fun stealing cigarettes and evading tax at the same time.

The owner of the lucky cat spins a homelier anecdote about when the factory was live:

“Some days, the air was white with smoke from the chimneys, a smell of tobacco and coffee everywhere – they had canteens, thousands of people worked here, two shifts every day [she exaggerates; there were 500 employees]. Busloads came all the way from Botrugno, from Maglie, all over Salento.”

And the raw material?

“Tobacco plants grew everywhere, the countryside was full of it. I watched kids playing around their mothers’ feet, their grandmothers – women working fields of plants with their children. The leaves grew huge, this big,” she spreads her hands wide, “they dried and stripped and threaded tobacco leaf in towns for kilometres around.”

She's right about the scale. Tobacco made work enough for 30,000 agricultural labourers and 11,000 processing workers in Salento (data valid to 1996).

Her story is notably lacking in men. Wandering the echoing rooms, a tune catches in my mind and it dawns on me that a popular folk song in the local dialect casually namedrops the plant that fed the production lines I’m walking...

Women, women going out to the tobacco,
When you go in twos and come back in four.
Who is it tells you to plant tobacco?
The sun is strong and dries everything.

The four-from-two motif, by the way, gets people arguing. Some locals say the women worked so hard they walked out to work upright but crawled home – four legs from two. Others interpret it as referring to rape in the fields, the women going out to work in pairs and returning home pregnant.

The archaeology of her story is visible all across the countryside. Outside of Lecce many smaller warehouses, used for processing raw tobacco plants, litter Salento in their hundreds and thousands. Criss-crossed with steel wires where the leaf once hung up to dry, those old farms and businesses now cultivate only rust, the buildings unsaleable whether in town or country.

Still, people are generally nostalgic about this work, even as they repeat the same harsh details: informal child labour performed without gloves to protect young hands from strong nicotine juice. I begin to spot a recurring theme underlying these industrial folk stories: that’s just how life was…

… until New Year’s Eve, 2010.

«È emerso che i costi complessivi dello stabilimento di Lecce sono superiori alla media di quelli degli altri siti produttivi in Europa»

(source)

"It appears that total costs at the Lecce plant are higher than average across other sites of production in Europe"

An entire industry, and the working culture around it, vanished overnight when this factory ceased production. Given that this industry pervaded the countryside and social landscape, it’s hardly surprising that people are nostalgic – even about such a demanding and damaging cash crop.

Such nostalgia is infectious, and my immediate reflex is to find a local artist or filmmaker, anyone who might help develop a meaningful and emotive take on these rooms. It’s a human reaction to empty space, to fill it with anything that comes to mind. Anything but this vast emptiness...

The night of the rescue, I dream up a fantasy of smuggling tobacco seeds into the site, cultivating my own little boutique plantation and cataloguing its progress from guerilla garden to rooftop cigar. The next day I look for urbex apps and trawl message boards, urgent to find others who have visited and recorded the buildings.

But it seems I’m alone, here. Even though the setting is urban and overlooked by tower blocks. There are almost no graffiti, drug paraphernalia, or smashed windows inside an area largely without visible security*. It feels as though a flock of noisy crows has taken on the job of caretaking all 21 acres (85000 m2).

The initial flush of ideas, the human reflex to bring friends or filmmakers, seeds or projects – or even concepts… these urges fade as I clock up days and hours in this place. In the end, I don’t even bother bringing an inkpad to resurrect the old rubber stamps that litter an office floor. Instead, I conform. Imagination yields inside these squared-off modules.

Negative space and timelessness have their way and nothing is done. With the vacant reflex jerk of a holidaying consumer I take phone pics as I explore. Ideas are minimised, made no-particular at the middle of this postglobal suburban desolitude. The crows execrate my presence, scaring me shitless with sudden flurries of wingbeats through the silence. 

But not everyone shares my feeling of solitary outsiderness. This site has serious financial value, even though “identifying investors interested in the ex BAT buildings remains highly complex" according to the Ministry for Economic Development. Indeed, "The few expressions of interest formalised so far are in any case not adequate to foresee a solution in the near term.” By 2015, the token 14 million Euros left behind by BAT to re-employ its workers had been hoovered up by investors promising to resurrect the space, their promises ending in rancour and allegations of fraud. Meanwhile, political society appears not to have done much since covid came along.

This calendar, by a petrolium distributor, shows the Direzione corridor in use a year after the last cigarette rolled off the production line. Another year on, the newspaper from Valentine's Day. And then there are interior redesigns pinned up in the central factory floor.

St Valentine's 2012

The most recent dated paper I saw, an ugly calendar of promotional shots featuring raw meat by a local butcher, has been hanging on its wall since 2015.

Memory and building alike fall apart with time. Nature is more efficient than money and politics, and while people commuting along the road outside look elsewhere, this factory will fall below some technical bureaucratic threshold and be condemned.

And while it isn’t for me to lament the inevitable, it would be a shame to share nothing of what I’ve accessed. All the more so because almost nothing documenting this place shows up online. A local newspaper takes regular interest, but features only pictures taken from outside. So I would share this story – somehow – yet the reality is resistant to linear narrative.

I can’t simply follow the industrial logic, leaf-in-here to fags-out-there; the ancillary details are too interesting, there’s too much engineering workshop and water treatment and administrative detritus and catering and ducting and ramified infrastructure to allow machineless corridors of infinite perspective do all the talking.

Instead, the stuff littering this site and the photos I’ve accumulated offer a spontaneous tension: let’s explore north & south, above & below, machine & human needs.

North & South

Like so much Italian history, you could frame the story of this factory in terms of the North screwing over the South, and you could do so at different levels of resolution geographically.

North Italy, with its industrialised agriculture ahead of the small-scale southern farmers, spotted the chance to move in and make money growing crops of Nicotiana tabacum. The broad flat plain of the River Po, running across Northern Italy from Turin to Venice, was adapted to growing at scale. Entrepreneurial Northern Italian farmers from the Veneto took trips around the villages of Salento offering buy up contracts, paying cash. Southern farmers had never heard of such lump sums, being paid NOT to slog in the fields for a change. So they sold up.

Multiple small contracts, which provided hard work enough for whole families, were purchased as the supply of tobacco leaf to this factory was consolidated by ever fewer agribusinessmen. The supply chain stretched from tens of kilometres to a thousand kilometres as production moved from South to North.

A sister engine survives in Lecce's railway museum

Fields became huge and industrial methods took over. Fimmene, fimmene gave way to tractors and pesticides.

While tobacco came from ever further away in Italy and beyond, still for decades the business of cutting and packing into cigarettes remained national. The state railway ran an agreement with the cigarette factory to keep it linked into their distribution network.

Under the direction of the State Monopoly, smaller factories closed and production was consolidated into fewer and bigger sites. Lecce did well out of this process. The “old” tobacco factory, noted industrial architecture from the 1930s, was replaced by the opening of our concrete monster in 1960.

From the roof of this site I spot Lecce's "old" tobacco factory, due to be repurposed

And so it went on, with occasional closures of smaller cigarette factories, until another – bigger – Northern business smelled profit. In 2004, Berlusconi was PM, the neoliberal mania for privatisation was in full swing, Juventus won and lost the football Championship by fiddling referees, and Italian Tobacco went up for auction. The whole national industry, in one lot.

The winning bid came in at 2.3 billion euros, the biggest investment ever put into Italy by a global business. British American Tobacco took over, promising that the sector would expand.

Police narrowly prevented this wing of the factory from being burnt down in protest by an angree employee owed 6 months pay

There’s a saying in Italian, “It doesn’t matter who rules as long as you eat.” (Francia o Spagna, basta che se magna). It was coined in renaissance Florence, at the dawn of globalisation, and well before jobs or cargo could move across borders more easily than people.

The fig leaf, not at all symbolic, grows endemic

Soon after privatisation, the gateway for trains was walled up, disconnecting the site from the national railway. The road network took more lorries as state entities came unstuck.

Above & Below

1. The Boss

Given how steep the social hierarchy was here in the ’60s, I’m surprised how perfunctory the oratorio turns out to be. The biggest boss of all, apparently, gets a whitewashed room with a plastic plant in one corner.

Indeed, it took seven years from the factory’s inauguration for Lecce's bishop to make it from his palace in the town centre all the way out here. He inaugurated this room in 1967, having journeyed 1.9 km from his episcopal palace to this far-flung suburb.

This chapel

raised in honour of the Sacred Heart

by the Directors of the Tobacco Monopoly

that it might support and comfort

those here experiencing the law of labour

given to man by God

for cooperation and redemption

solemnly blessed by

H.E. Msgr. Francesco Minerva

bishop of Lecce

13th April 1967

The text seems to excuse the directors from any obligation to participate. Presumably they were too distant, socially or physically, to present themselves? Or maybe they just wouldn’t need the same kind of sollievo (comfort) as their workers?

Little framed icons of the BVM and religious traces hold strategic positions around the site

By the 1960s it was already clear that Italians were growing less keen on the church. Lecce is undeniably conservative, but the architecture of this oratorio is remarkably uninspiring. There’s a bureaucratic feel; it even occupies the ground floor underneath the offices and housing of the Direzione up on the first floor. The effect is decidedly functional.

In an annexe behind the oratorio I find a grey metal locker, not the sort of furniture Italy normally employs for storing religious paraphernalia. The corporate vibe even makes it into this official stamp of the prayer group, bereft of Lecce’s typically decorative flourish.

Prayer Group
Tobacco Factory
Viale Della Repubblica, Lecce

And I’m surprised to see its accompanying date stamp, frozen on Christmas day 2000, a full decade before the factory closed.

At least the metal cross on the door had some value, financial or sentimental. It still casts a shadow today.

2. The bosses

Above the turnstiles of the workers’ entrance, the air noisy with absence, I creep up a flight of stairs most people never got to use. I hear my heart speed with adrenaline as any lone operative might, called in for a disciplinary meeting...

We inform the Messrs of this Directorship that, during the 36th week, the personnel of the company responsible for loading/unloading materials did not complete their assigned work leaving, on the Friday evening, the equivalent of two lorry loads to be carried to upper floors. Given the summer season, and once transported upstairs, this could lead to outbreaks of insect breeding spots and subsequent infestation of upper zones recently subject to disinfestation treatment. Signed, Warehouse Manager

The doors are of a nicer quality, and the offices look out over Viale della Repubblica as well as inwards to the site. But the big glass conference table I expected turns out to be half the size you’d imagine. There’s an apartment at the end of the Direzione corridor, but the place is devoid of furniture to get any feeling of luxury. An ex-employee of the workshop floor tells me that real power lay elsewhere, the management here limited to smaller decisions.

I wonder the private apartment, wondering who chose the pineapple tiling on the kitchen wall? Perhaps the same person who placed a bathroom doorkey in the centre of a clean bathtub on the day they moved out, leaving it to spread its little shadow of key-shaped rust down the years?

The one cupboard with no lock on the door

There are few physical barriers between the huge entrance hall downstairs and the intimate spaces above. No swipe-carded computerised locks adorn these walls; the Direzione was separated from overalled mechanics by nothing less secure than daily habit.

3. Small gods

The voids where machinery once ran leave plenty of room for hopes and fears. Set in motion not only by walled-in emptiness, but by myriad tiny traces of minutely unruly humanity, primeval psychological games play themselves out in my mind around some unforeseen details.

Inexplicable, a baby’s seat is propped in the shadow of three massive sloping agricultural conveyors and this tiny red throne transforms the trio of machines into magi. They kneel with heads bowed at a gargantuan nativity. The crumbling shed actually is the old order here, artistic convention made real, concretised.

Plastic figurines gather around the empty seat, awaiting ruin or salvation

A blonde madonna perches on a toilet in bra and knickers, her head thrown back in laughter, lipstick and teeth. She’s holding a cigarette, the ash grown so long it threatens to fall.
        “Come here Marco cos I need to shit… I wanna shit in your mouth” she says, penned in neat capital letters in a speech bubble over the white bathroom tiles behind her head. Her friend stands with her back to us, arse and thighs in soft focus occupying nearly half the scene, her back branded with the GQ logo.

Around the time this factory was planned and built, female Trades Unionists made names for themselves in response to ever-faster production lines. I can’t work out if I’m looking at the remains of someone’s rebellious streak or an attempt to conform...

Machine & Human Needs

1. Food

The celebrated Italian gelato

The industrial vibe extends into a kitchen and canteen which I find occupying a long first floor off to one side of the main site. Indeed, the Italian word alimentazione can mean both human nutrition and industrial supply.

I follow the lunch queue towards the hot plates of the serving station. Having toured the open halls of the production areas, this approach feels warm and inviting in slanting afternoon light.

If today it lacks the smells of catering, I realise the neighbours don’t exaggerate, that they probably could smell coffee from outside the walls.

The serving stations are still stacked with white ceramic plates and ladles. Behind the scenes in the kitchen I find a pressure cooker big enough to bathe in, its heavy stainless steel lid slow on thick hinges.

The walk-in fridges are empty. But on the shelves are pickled onions in a big glass jar, tetrapacks of cream long ago eaten by rats, cartons of sea salt and litre bottles of white wine vinegar, darkened with time.

The remnants of human and machine alimentazioni remind me as much of chemistry as cookery, blurring distinction between factory and food.

2. Drink

There was an entire department for water management here, the north side of the site hosting a series of deep concrete tanks and a control room.

Italians consume more bottled water per head than any other nation on earth.

The desk drawers still contain reagents and other remnants for testing water quality.

Liquid lunch? Tap water in Italy is subject to more legal controls than bottled mineral water.

3. Breath

The large factory floors have electronic panels hanging from the ceilings to display humidity and air temperature. The leaf must have handled differently, packed more or less tightly into paper cigarette tubes, outside certain parameters.

Since the 1950s, byproducts such as dust and stem have been reconstituted into artificial tobacco sheet. These glued sheets are dried then sliced and added back into the blend. While global consumption of combustible cigarettes is dropping, the market for “recon” is increasing as cigarette makers cut corners and heated tobacco products become popular.

An ex employee of this factory tells me there were dozens of self-cleaning filters, the sound of their blasting air a constant presence. In fact, the shed with the three agricultural lifters originally held the air pressurisation plant, used to blow shredded leaf around the site.

The ducting that carried air out from the factory floors clutches at the roof like galvanised steel fingers. 

There are no smoking signs aplenty, and cigarette butts all over the place.

The Dust of Lecce
Il Polvere Leccese

On the upper floor of the main block, a false ceiling under the roof magnifies footsteps of birds roosting above. I set them into panic, and their chaos reactivates my fear.

My creeping footsteps startle birds whose sudden flight sets off echoes through these silent spaces

I crunch stalagmites of crusty guano and bones. But the “Dust of Lecce” was once a luxury product, the best quality snuff on the market. Until the mid 1900s, powdered tobacco grown in Salento was snuffed up royal noses (Napoleon I included) at the finest courts all over Europe, until cigars took over. 

Now my footprints mark dust of an entirely less celebrated kind. I look back at where I’ve walked, and the lasting impression of this place is an overpowering absence. It instils fear, and not fear of being caught by a patrolling guard (even the security systems – most of them* – seem redundant, disconnected from the outside world). It’s more a fear of decline, born from hours immersed in the grand abandonment of this structure.

And the cat?

She used to be a hissing, fearful nightmare of an animal before she disappeared. Three weeks pass before the night we hear her howling from beyond the high wall yet there she is, a kilo lighter, scruffy and rat-bitten. I thought she’d panic. Instead she kept her head for the five minutes it took me to carry her back the dark and twisting route to safety. She cried but didn’t struggle – I was grateful she didn’t have my hand off.

She abandoned something there, too, back in the factory. It seems as though she kicked her fear. Or lived it through, the worst that could possibly happen to a cat, and has given up worrying in favour of a happier life. If she still hisses occasionally, it’s with less aggression, and she might let you stroke her. She seems almost grateful.

* I spotted one tiny modern camera with an intact cable, a green LED clearly lit, watching the road near an electricity control point. Once after I’d been up on the roof (and clearly visible for miles around), people arrived to unlock a gate and check access to a peripheral building off the edge of the site. An unlikely coincidence? They didn’t seem to enter the walled area. One modern car, a large Subaru, is parked up on a delivery platform inside the site with petrol cans nearby and plants growing around a wheel; not the kind of vehicle used for security patrols. More likely a surveying engineer who got unlucky with a breakdown? Otherwise I saw no manned patrols or believably operational cameras.