Carrara marble

More marble has come out of these mountains than out of any other place on Earth.

Carrara marble is the white to blue-grey stone quarried in the mountains just outside Carrara, in the province of Massa and Carrara in the Lunigiana, at the northernmost tip of Tuscany. There are over 650 quarry sites near the city. The Romans called it marmor lunense, Luna marble, after the ancient town nearby.

Not all of it is the same stone. The finest grade is statuario, very fine-grained with an ivory colour, high tensile strength, able to take a high gloss and hold very fine detail, which is why it went into monumental sculpture. Another white grade, ordinario, sometimes carries a greyish cast. A streaked grey, black and white marble called Bardiglio is quarried at Carrara too, and the Romans used it especially for revetment and flooring.

Its Roman career has a clear shape. White Carrara marble was extracted only sporadically until the mid to late 1st century BC, then quarried intensively. Through the 1st century AD it was the principal white marble used in Rome itself, before being gradually displaced during the 2nd century by eastern marbles. It was exported in enormous quantities around the western Mediterranean, into southern France, eastern Spain and parts of western North Africa.

Then it came back. Carrara marble returned to favour in the Renaissance and was quarried hard through the 19th and 20th centuries, and Carrara remains the centre of the worldwide stone industry today.

The medieval trade was a business of families and long journeys. Most quarries belonged to the Marquis Malaspina, who rented them to Carrara masters handling both extraction and transport. From 1474 the Maffioli, and later Giovanni Pietro Buffa, supplied marble for the facade of the Certosa di Pavia, shipping it by sea around the whole Italian peninsula and then up the Po and the Ticino by boat. In 1564 the ruling Cybo and Malaspina families created an Office of Marble to regulate the industry.

The quarries are active industrial sites. Look up at the white scars from the valley road.