The great Michelangelo Buonarroti (Caprese, 1475 – Rome, 1564), though he did not leave any of his works of art in Carrara, always had a close relationship with the town, staying there many times to visit the quarries and choose personally the marbles which gave life to his masterpieces: in…
Every part of the territory of the Apuan Alps is characterised by the presence of immense veins of a precious marble, which is famous all over the world and whose mining, according to historical testimonies, dates back to at least 155 BC. That is the date of creation of the…
We know marble thanks to the numerous art pieces which are made of it, but this precious material can have many other uses. We can recap them into five main groups: art, construction industry, city planning, objects and furnishing, industry. Art The most famous use of the marble is for…
The marble of Carrara, once divided into blocks, is sent to the ships waiting for it in the port that transport it all across the world, or it is moved to the workshops that will turn the stone material in a processed product. One of the main destinations of the…
The bench wall, once separated from the mountain, is firstly handled or divided into square or rectangular blocks to be moved, in order to make it easier the transportation from the mountain to the plain, where marble is processed or continues its journey to the port of Carrara to reach…
Since ancient times, there have been different methods to mine marble from quarries, though the most substantial development of the mining techniques has occurred over the last one hundred-one hundred fifty years. The “cutting” phase is the one in which the marble “bench wall” (the part from which the blocks…
The quarry is the place from which the marble is mined. In Carrara, nowadays, there are eighty-one active quarries in the three mining basins of the Apuan Alps that form the Carrione valley: the Torano basin, the Miseglia basin and the Colonnata basin, which are named after the three mountain…
The different typologies of marble do not refer to categories of scientific classification, but to their commodity and commercial features. Different names have been created to identify the external characteristics that Carrara marble may have: they were born mainly in the quarrying and processing context (often mutated by quarrymen’s jargon…
Scientifically, marble is a carbonate rock which originated from metamorphic genesis: that means it is born from the transformation of a pre-existing rock, whose composition and structure underwent changes over the time caused by the intervention of different chemical and physical factors. Specifically, the Apuan marble is the result of…