Bathroom Countertops
Carrara countertops
CARRARA, Italy - I thought the guy was joking when he said,
"The snows of Carrara countertops never melt." Snow seemed out of place in this northern Tuscan town on the Mediterranean.
But then I rounded a bend in the coast highway north of Carrara and spotted them: glaciers of white tumbling from mountaintop to valley floor. The thing is, it was not snow - it was marble. ...
Behind Carrara for bathroom
Behind Carrara and the neighboring towns of Massa and Pietrasanta lie deposits some 16 miles long, 6 miles wide and a mile and a half deep. In them are 40 kinds of precious marble, an alphabet of color and texture nuances, from swirled gray Arabescato to zebra-striped Zebrino.
The villages and towns of the region are themselves monuments to marble. Carrara's medieval center, for instance, is chock-a-block with it: Churches, theaters and aristocratic palazzi were built from choice white stones. ...
Carrara is Italy's attractions
Carrara is among Italy's most unusual and alluring attractions. But it is not for the timid. The dust is thick, the noise deafening. Everywhere you look, outsized bulldozers pile mounds of shattered stone under the sheer faces of the quarries to cushion the fall of massive marble blocks cut away from them with high-speed diamond wires. Giant trucks loaded with these blocks, which weigh up to 20 tons each, thunder through the interminable tunnels of the Ferrovia Marmifera, a serpentine railway. ...
Carrara - artwork in progress
Five hundred years after Michelangelo's unrealized folly, Carrara is still an artwork in progress, perennially half-hidden by the pall of white dust raised by the frenzy of about 200 quarries and dozens of sawmills and polishing or crushing plants. Not to mention the artists' studios and countless curio factories that churn out copies of the David or imitations of Canova's wraith-like Graces. Though not to everyone's taste, they certainly beat garden gnomes. ...
Home of bulls
The marble-dusted village of Torano, where many a famous artist has lived in the last 2,000 years, takes its name from the word tori, or bulls. This is where the Romans, and the medieval stonemasons who succeeded them, kept their oxen. Rough-and-ready, Torano exudes antiquity but feels like a California Gold Rush town made of stone. Locals proudly call the area Italy's Wild West. ...
Carrara workshops
Like other Carrara workshops, SGF carves sculptures for some of the world's top contemporary artists. It comes as news to many visitors that these artists do not themselves execute their works. It shouldn't: For the last five centuries the distinction between scultore (a marble-carving technician) and artista (an artist) has been clearly defined in Carrara. Mario Fruendi, a partner at SGF, chuckled as he told me, ...