The abandoned Sicilchim factory

The abandoned Sicilchim factory is an industrial ruin on the outskirts of Vigàta, beside the brushland known as the Pasture and stretching toward the shore. Its failed promise of progress remains visible in corroded machinery and broken structures; its enclosing walls also turn it into a secluded space where Montalbano finds an object that appears to implicate Ingrid Sjostrom. The factory is at once a material remnant of political and economic failure and a setting in which appearances prove unreliable.

Setting and Physical Remains

The Pasture takes its name from an old story of a goatherd letting his animals graze there. It is a broad tract of Mediterranean brush, almost reaching the coast. Behind it stand the ruins of the chemical works, enclosed by a high wall. The wall was built to prevent migrants wandering through the city from settling inside the abandoned complex, so the factory’s isolation is not simply the consequence of its collapse: it was also deliberately secured against the people who might have sought shelter there.

The factory is surrounded by two walls. The more recent protective wall has a small iron entrance door; behind it, a crumbling enclosure once marked the boundary of the operating works. From breaches in this inner wall, Montalbano sees rusted machinery, large tubes, gigantic alembics, iron scaffolding riddled with holes, precariously balanced trestles and steel turrets rising at irregular angles. The floors are broken open in places. Iron truss beams have given way over voids, leaving only dilapidated cement below, split by cracks where yellowing grass grows. From outside, the old structures already look strange against the landscape; within the walls, their ruin becomes a more intricate record of damage, exposure and abandonment.

A Failed Promise of Development

The factory had been inaugurated by Deputy Cusumano when economic progress seemed to be gathering force. The promise did not last: the supposed winds of development dwindled, while the short-lived boom left behind damage, compensation claims and unemployment. The ruins therefore belong to more than an abandoned industrial site. They make the broken aftermath of a public vision physically present, while the wall preserves the outlines of a complex that no longer serves its original purpose.

The factory’s decline also sits beside the changing life of the Pasture. For years, Splendour’s garbage collectors treated the area as an easy sector, clearing paper, plastic bags, cans and human waste. In the more recent period described in the book, discarded condoms had multiplied into a carpet. That change is associated with the arrival of military detachments in Sicily to assist with controlling the territory, after which soldiers stationed in nearby towns sought out the secluded brush. The factory is not itself identified as the site of those encounters, but its presence gives the surrounding landscape a common character: a neglected margin shaped by official decisions and used in ways far removed from the development its construction once represented.

Montalbano’s Entry and the Factory’s Sound

When Montalbano returns to the Pasture, he finds the little iron door’s lock crusted with salt and rust. He has anticipated the difficulty and brought spray oil normally used to lubricate firearms. While it works, he waits in his car and listens to a radio account of the funeral for Silvio Luparello. The door turns, but debris—plaster chips, metal scraps and sand—prevents it from opening freely. He has to push it with his shoulder to make a gap wide enough to squeeze through; the obstruction suggests that the factory’s custodian has not been there for years.

Inside, a low, continuous vibration catches his attention. At first he suspects that machinery is somehow running in the dead complex. He leaves to retrieve his pistol, then follows a careful route through the narrow corridor between the walls, guided by a precise drawing made by Saro Montaperto. The sound is not mechanical: wind moves through the factory’s broken structures, including cables and perforated smokestacks, producing a varied, musical hum that stops and resumes in changing modulations. The distinction matters to the investigation’s atmosphere. A site whose machinery has fallen silent still produces a sound that can be mistaken for activity; the apparent sign of life comes from air passing through industrial remnants.

The Handbag Among the Debris

After nearly half an hour of climbing over rubble, Montalbano reaches the place corresponding to where Saro found the necklace, on the other side of the wall. The surrounding refuse is specific to this abandoned margin: sun-yellowed magazines and paper, weeds, Coca-Cola bottles, wine bottles, a bottomless metal wheelbarrow, tyres, iron scraps, an unidentifiable object and a rotten wooden beam. Beside the beam lies a stylish, brand-new leather handbag, conspicuously out of place among the debris.

The bag contains two large stones. They appear to have been added as ballast so that it could be thrown over the outer wall, and the bag is otherwise empty. Its owner’s metal initials have been torn away, but the leather retains the impressions of an I and an S, identifying Ingrid Sjostrom. Montalbano reads the arrangement as too conveniently incriminating: the stones suggest a deliberate trajectory into the factory, while the surviving initials point toward a particular woman. The ruined site thus becomes more than a hiding place for discarded objects. Its walls and debris provide the physical setting for what looks like staged evidence, making the factory’s isolation part of the investigator’s problem: an object can be made to appear to tell a clear story precisely because it has been placed where its route seems legible.