Rasa is the youngest istrian town made in 1937 by the fascist Italy on land rich with coal, a mineral crucial in WWII. In 1936 Benito Mussolini in person laid the foundation stone for this city that the architect Gustavo Pulitzer Finali designed without a graveyard and with a church resembling a turned over coal vagon.
It’s unique architecture, mining history, today’s decay and gloomy geographic location make it an otherworldly place that I’ve been photographing for the last two years.
Prvomajska, formerly the main entrance to the mines in Rasa, was transformed into a very successful machine tool factory in the 80-ies, but then closed in 2002, and now totally abandoned to nature and vandals.
It is one of the subjects I’ve been returning to regularly in the last 12 months. Like many other similar abandoned places it is an open book on the flow of time, on the questionable values we give to things, on the fact that everything changes and on the strange beauty of those changes that, even if we label as endings, are always life.
