Mountains Made of Marble

By Awake! writer in Italy

THE peaks that dominate Carrara and Pietrasanta seem to be flecked with snow. But this is an illusion. Those white patches are really vast areas of debris produced by quarrying. These mountains in the Apuan Alps of Tuscany, located in north-central Italy, are a geologic rarity. Here the mountains are made of marble. Nowhere else in the world can such a concentration of this noble material be found.

From antiquity man has extracted stone from these mountains and transformed it into columns, panels, floors, and stunning sculptures. Substantial marble deposits, the experience and professionalism of local workers, and the quality of technology used here have won this district the role of world stone marketplace. In addition to locally quarried materials, stone shipped to the port of Marina di Carrara from every corner of the globe is also processed by the area’s specialized industries and is then exported worldwide.

An Ancient Marble Tradition

The ancient Romans exploited local stones for construction and sculpture. Carrara’s white statuary marble is held to be especially beautiful. In 1505, Michelangelo came here to choose blocks of fine-grained marble without any veining or defects, which he used when sculpturing some of his most celebrated masterpieces.

Ancient methods of quarrying remained basically unchanged for centuries. Wooden wedges were strategically inserted into natural cracks or recesses carved into the rock. When water was poured over the wedges, they swelled, finally detaching a block. Explosives were introduced in the mid-18th century, but these shattered so much of the rock that, at most, only a third could be used. Huge chunks of leftover marble​—those patches that appear to be snow—​bear testimony to the methods of bygone days.

Moving monoliths down steep inclined planes with sleds and ropes was perilous business. “If the cable holding the sled broke,” explains one source, “it meant certain death for the gang leader, who stood in front of the block to direct operations; and there was little chance of escape for any in his gang struck by the cable as if by a terrible whiplash.”

Modern methods, of course, are very different. I spent a day in the Carrara area and was given some insight into how marble is currently worked. Let me share with you what I learned.

A Visit to the Quarry

I find Giovanni, who is to be my guide to the quarry, in one of the many marble yards of Carrara. Such yards stock hundreds of marble blocks, stacked neatly one on top of the other, ready to be sold or worked on site. Automatic machines saw slabs out of blocks, and others do the polishing. Both jobs once had to be done by hand.

For our visit to the quarry, we take Giovanni’s four-wheel-drive vehicle and are soon negotiating steep hairpin turns that lead  us into a narrow mountain valley where fragments of white rock lie all around. The trucks we see laboring downhill bearing enormous blocks of stone can carry loads of up to 30 tons.

Rounding a bend, we sight a dazzling white wall carved into the mountain. It is huge and is made up of a series of giant steps, or benches, each some 20 to 30 feet [6 to 9 m] high. Giovanni drives onto one and stops.

A glance around reveals that we are in one of the many quarries in the valley. More white scars, some of them hundreds of feet above us, stand out on the natural rock surface. This has rightly been called a ‘grand yet terrible’ spectacle.

My musing is interrupted by a bulldozer working with a pointed tool to turn over a section of our bench. The block, perfectly squared and measuring perhaps 40 by 7 feet and 20 feet in height [11 m by 2 by 6], crashes onto a bed of rubble prepared to cushion its fall. But how is the rock removed in blocks like that?

The answer comes from Franco, Giovanni’s father, who has worked in the quarries all his life. He shows me a pulley driving a long steel cable that is making a vertical cut into the back wall of the bench we are on. A three-inch [8 cm] hole is drilled horizontally into the rock face, he explains, then another vertically into the bench above. The two holes have to intersect. A diamond-studded steel cable is then threaded through the holes and made into a loop, like a giant necklace. Tensed and driven at high speed by an electric motor, the cable makes the cut desired. When all the block’s faces​—horizontal and vertical—​have been freed, the block is turned over. Then, using the same cable, it is cut into pieces of a more manageable size for transportation. Similar methods are used in underground quarries nearby, where marble is cut from chambers in the very heart of these mountains.

Local factories transform this raw material into a whole range of products​—tiles, structural elements, facing for use in architecture. Construction is, and has always been, the main outlet for Carrara’s stone products.

Some workshops produce floors and interior or exterior furnishings designed to order. Others specialize in ornate  mantelpieces, bathroom fittings, tables, and the like. Local products in any of the beautifully patterned and colored stones available on the market are destined to adorn public squares as well as public and private buildings, including places of worship, museums, shopping malls, airports, and skyscrapers worldwide.

The industrial side of marble is interesting, but I am also interested in decorative and artistic applications. To learn more about these, I spend the afternoon at Pietrasanta.

The Marble Workshops

“Drop by at the craftsmen’s workshops,” invites a Pietrasanta tourist information booklet, and they “will be glad to show you their skill.” Pietrasanta is a friendly little place, and it is no problem for me simply to wander into several of the workshops in and around the medieval center to admire the works being produced there.

Here I meet sculptors from many lands who are busy on bold original works, while local artisans, their hands and faces covered with white dust, are intent on reproducing statues from plaster models. Crammed with classical and modern treasures, studio showrooms look like overcrowded museums.

Sculpturing a statue is a long process. A two-ton block, for instance, might be roughly shaped using a machine saw; then, from three to five months may be spent carefully chipping away at the block before the job is done. A ton of marble may be removed in the process. Basic tools once included hammers, chisels, and files. Now, angle grinders and pneumatic chisels​—the “little brothers” of pavement-breaking jackhammers—​speed up operations, but details have to be finished by hand. The results can be breathtakingly beautiful.

The ancient art of marble carving does not survive in many places. Yet, thanks to its resources, to the ability acquired by master craftsmen through centuries of experience, and to artists who come here to tap local knowledge, the area of Carrara and Pietrasanta can rightly be called “a great marble academy.”

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Underground quarry

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Diamond-studded cable is used to cut blocks of marble

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Marble quarries, Carrara, Italy

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A marble statue of Emperor Augustus, first century C.E.

[Credit Line]

Scala/Art Resource, NY

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Studio SEM, Pietrasanta