Following the Marble
A photographic journey from Carrara to Florence… From the mountain to “David”
Along the coast of Northern Italy is Carrara — the town where for millennia the whitest, finest marble on earth has been harvested. It is from here that the marble for Rome’s Colosseum was quarried. It is from here that Michelangelo hand-picked his chunks from which to carve his best-known works. There is something mythical about Carraran marble. I couldn’t separate the shape from the stone. I couldn’t separate the stone from the place. It’s a place I have long wanted to visit.
In the last days of October 2015, I was finishing up at a conference in Turin, and I decided I would schedule a return flight from Florence about a week after the conference ended. For many people this would be no big deal, but it had been a while since I had traveled alone in another country, and I’d become relatively grumpy and oldish in the intervening years. I tried like hell to find someone to travel with, but failing to do so, I decided to do it anyway.
My natural instinct would be to plan it out — sit with a map and schedule and decide where I would be each night of the journey, get hotels, read up on the towns, figure out how I’d get to a quarry, stuff like that. But other than the return flight, I didn’t. I wanted to go with no plan, no reservations, and feel both fear and discovery in the journey. This whole trip was out of character for me. Only the camera made me comfortable. It’s hard to explain, but the camera gave me purpose, and safety, and a general sense that no matter how shitty it was, I’d have pictures.
This was a very do-able journey. Lots of trains ran from Turin toward Florence, and Carrara is sorta in the middle. What I noticed was that the region called Cinque Terra was very close to Carrara. I had seen photos of this part of Italy, they’re picturesque and iconic, but I had never researched much about them. Cinque Terra is, as the name suggests, five adorable oceanfront towns, built into the mountainside at the sea’s edge. While ambitious cars can get to these towns, they are not designed for those vehicles. There are also hiking trails through the region, which is another classic way to explore, but the train is pretty great.
So off I went, with a train to La Spezia, where I switched to a smaller regional line that handled the five towns of Cinque Terra. They are, in order along the line: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso. One of the great pleasures in life is saying the names of those places out loud.
I knew nothing of these towns but it was late afternoon when I reached the first, Riomaggiore, and felt the first order of business would be to drag my suitcase up the steep street to find a place to sleep. I didn’t want anything fancy but I was surprised that it wasn’t easy to locate a room. Also: hills and steps. It’s not particularly simple to roll a bag around. But I found an empty apartment for rent for a few days: it was sparse and perfect. I decided I’d make that my base of operations, to check out some of these Cinque Terra towns.
My next two days were their own delightful adventure: exploring a few towns, the Czech girl at the restaurant, the walk by the church at sunset, staying out late, but I’ll save that for another time; by day three I was ready to head to Carrara, and planned to return for a final night in Riomaggiore before continuing on to Florence.
Since I had only one day for this, I set off early on the first train, scheduled to arrive before 7am. It was only an hour ride; I watched the mountains race by from the train window, and soon I noticed what looked like snowy peaks in the distance. As we approached I realized it wasn’t snow, but marble. Mountains where the surface had been scraped away to reveal pure white.
I got off at the appropriate trainstop for Carrara, but apparently that isn’t exactly Carrara, and it dawned on me that a little planning would have been wise. There were no taxis at the hour, but it didn’t seem that far to town so I set off walking up the long boulevard; just me and my camera and a few batteries and some cash. Then I saw a bus, and while I didn’t know where it was going, it seemed to be going in the right direction; with map in hand I planned to jump off when it veered somewhere I didn’t want to be. The end of the line was a hotel in the north end of town, and getting off there still didn’t make me feel like I was closer to my objective.
Apparently the quarries aren’t in Carrara. The quarries are scattered around in the mountains above town: little villages of stone workers where the men had been working the stone for generations. But I looked at the map and identified a route that lead from where I was to what looked like a quarry and I just started walking up the road: yet another of my ill-conceived ideas. It was a treacherously narrow road — small cars squealed around the turns and large trucks barreled down at unstoppable speeds. An hour later and bathed in sweat I did something I had never done: I stuck out my thumb.
The guy who finally stopped said something in Italian, I smiled and said “quarry?” and he gestured I get in. He was talkative, chain smoking, and I decided not to complain. I’m not sure he ever realized I didn’t understand him, he just kept chatting until we got to the top of the mountain where he dropped me off, waved distractedly, and forked away.
Still early, it was a short walk to the quarry fence and open gate. Enormous chunks of broken marble littered the sides of the road and the area was clearly marked with “no trespassing” signs. I took as many photos as I could from the open gate and nearby hill, but it was unsatisfying. Below me I could see blocks of white marble the size of pickup trucks, neatly arranged. I walked back up the hill and discovered a small house converted into a touristy marble shop. The yard was populated with every sort of carved icon — Jesus, David, crosses, pyramids, dolphins, and oversized chess pieces. It wasn’t open, but a friendly woman behind a counter flagged me in. The inside was like the outside, with more white objects, only smaller.
She said there were no tours here, but that she could call her son and he would show me around for $50.
Ivano arrived in a dusty jeep and I climbed in. After a few minutes his English was surprisingly understandable and we crawled higher into the mountain while he described what was around us and I explained my photographic objectives. At first he’d stop at scenic overlooks and was surprised I was uninterested in taking pictures. He said he had never shown anyone around who wanted to photograph the dump trucks tires and overhead wires. He found my selections ridiculously amusing.
He told me that the quarries of Carrara are still very active, worked by about 1000 men, a job that has been in their families for ages. Originally, in Roman times, marble veins had to be leveraged where stones would naturally cleave apart with a chisel. He showed me some of the older areas where the Colosseum was mined with crude tools. This guy was attentive and he generously stopped whenever I’d freak out from something I was seeing from the car. Moving on, we stopped to visit his friends on a high plateau and we talked to the men working a new area.
They don’t chisel any more — the stone cutting process involves running a diamond-coated “rope” across the rock with little motors; over long periods of time it cuts rock apart. The blocks are pushed out of the way, and a different set of men walk among the 40-ton chunks and rate them for quality. Trucks race up and down the road delivering them and since they are paid by the number they deliver, they are always in a dangerous hurry. The white calcium carbonate powder that covers all surfaces is not particularly unhealthy to breath, but it makes the risk of snow-blindness among the workers something they protect against. It’s bright everywhere.
As I took photos I noticed that even in color, every picture was like a black-and-white photo. Most surfaces were geometric — flat or cubed—monochromatic, and high contrast. Temporary power lines ran across man-made canyons to run the diamond rope cutters. And everyone was very friendly to me, with Ivano by my side; his pals posed for photos and shouted pleasantries in broken English.
Then we’d hop back in the jeep and take off again. The ups and downs in the area were so steep I braced against the door as he laughed. Ivano looked at me for a moment, judging my backbone, before grinning and gearing into a tunnel, just a little wider than the car, plunging us deep through the mountain. The other end was straight ahead but began as a point of light. I could feel the claustrophobia grip me, the gravity of the rock heavy on all sides. We stopped in an enormous wet dark cavern about half way through. It was like being under water.
I returned to Riomaggiore by evening for a last dinner by the sea, and continued to Florence in the morning. Aside from the usual attractions, I was particularly interested in the marble sculptures and spent my last few days there, down the street from the Duomo.
Standing before the statue of David at the Accademia I had a new appreciation for the work. I had never realized how large it was. And I absolutely never realized how white and perfect. Marble, I had seen, is remarkably hard metamorphic rock. It’s almost inconceivable how this figure emerged from a block.
The stone was hauled down the mountain and to Florence in 1464 where a sculptor was commissioned for the project, but he rejected the marble as being too mangled and flawed; and rejected again in 1475 by another sculptor. The 14 foot block sat abandoned in the Duomo yard for another 25 years until 26 year old (but already famous) Michaelangelo got to it. He saw what they didn’t. It took him just over two years to carve it. It is a marvel.
“When all was finished, it cannot be denied that this work has carried off the palm from all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin; no other artwork is equal to it in any respect, with such just proportion, beauty and excellence did Michelagnolo finish it”. —Giorgio Vasari (~1550)
I’m glad I pushed through my internal resistances to make this journey, but the experience was bittersweet. As much as I marveled at the magnificence of the sculptures and the creative human effort involved, I couldn’t help but see the mountain as being chewed up, sliced up and consumed — like an old growth forest or perhaps a blue whale. On one hand the mountains of white seemed enormous and endless, but on the other, of course nothing is endless. The industrial production of marble, not for the Michaelangelos but crappy Vegas hotel rooms, disturbed me. I loved the small towns and families of stoneworkers, but had to reconcile this with my distaste for the poor use by humanity. I actually don’t tend to like constructions with marble. It’s the same feeling I have when I see the long trucks near Santa Cruz carrying felled furry redwoods, like woolly mammoths, off to be reduced to lumber.
In the end I fixated on the journey, the transformation of matter. From the raw blocks, broken into smaller and smaller bits as moved down the hill and through towns, increasingly processed, and then at the end of the road, refined into our own image. Like God blowing life into Adam’s lungs. And then again as dust.
