Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

Hello and thank you for downloading the podcast of the BBC World Service History Program Witness

with me Simon Watts.

Today I'm bringing you the story of a mining disaster in 1956,

which is still remembered every year in Italy.

Italian immigrants accounted for more than half the dead in a terrible accident

in Marsinel in Belgium.

At the bitter heart mine Marsinel, smoke pours out of the shaft from an underground fire which has trapped

260 men half a mile below the surface.

In August 1956, Europe watched in horror as a huge fire ripped through a coal mine in the Belgian town of Marcinell.

Desperately anxious families waited the pithead, as a few miners have brought up,

some of them are the last time. More than half those families were immigrants

and by far the biggest group were Italians. This is a tragedy which reaches across frontiers.

For half the trapped men are Italians.

In the years after the Second World War, the outlook for many Italians was bleak.

Much of the country lay in ruins, and particularly in the south, there was very little work or food.

Hundreds of thousands of Italians headed for America, but others chose the option of Belgium.

...