By Isla Quinn
Stand below the Apuan Alps and the slopes look scarred. Pale cuts in the rock where marble has been coming out for as long as anyone has kept count.
The Romans called it marmor lunense, Luna marble, and quarried it for roughly twenty-two centuries by one count. In ancient times the work was organized under imperial staff, and the stone went into landmarks. The Pantheon is the one most often named. Luna was then the port town that marketed the marble, which is where the name comes from.
The second great chapter belongs to Michelangelo. His David, carved between 1501 and 1504, came from Carrara marble, from the grade called statuario, a pure white stone sculptors prize. He knew the quarries well enough to go and choose blocks himself. His Pietà in St Peter’s came from a Carrara block as well. Statuario is a selection, not a given. Most of what comes off these mountains is not that grade, and sculptors have always known the difference between merely white marble and marble good enough to carve a face from.
Moving stone was its own problem. Starting in 1474, suppliers sent marble for the façade of the Certosa di Pavia. It went by ship all the way around the Italian coast and then up the Po and Ticino rivers by boat to reach the monastery site. Water, even the long way round, beat the overland road.
The mountains show the scale of the work. Over time more than 730 quarries have been opened across the Apuan Alps. Roughly 160 are active today, 81 of them in the Carrara district. Other sources count more than 650 sites above Carrara alone and say about half are now inactive or abandoned. The counts differ by who is counting and what counts as a quarry, but the conclusion is the same: Carrara has produced more marble than any other place on earth.