Cala d'Oliva

Cala d'Oliva is a settlement on the island of Asinara, in the comune of Porto Torres. It began as a fishing village and in 1885 was expropriated to become part of the Asinara prison.

It was a branch of the Asinara prison and is now part of the Asinara National Park.

The watchtower of Cala d'Oliva, like those of Cala d'Arena and Trabuccato, was built by the Spanish in the 17th century.

On 22 June 1885 the seventh Depretis government, which that same year had declared the whole island public property, set up a penal colony at Cala d'Oliva. Since then the village has had no permanent residents.

In summer 1985, after rumours of a possible attack, the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were moved to Cala d'Oliva, where in a month of work they wrote the indictment for the Palermo maxi-trial against the Mafia. At the end of their stay the two magistrates had to pay the state back for their lodging, 10,000 lire of the time (about €12.90) per person per day. In 2016 the film Era d'estate was made about the two judges' work there that summer.

In June 2017 the Osservatorio della Memoria museum opened in the former central branch of Cala d'Oliva, which once housed the best-behaved inmates of the Asinara prison. Nearby is the bunker cell built in the past to hold Salvatore Riina; fishermen once nicknamed it "the disco" because for security reasons it was lit every night with floodlights visible for kilometres. It was restored in 2015 as an exhibition space.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian