Bathroom Countertops at OldGraniteAndMarble.us

• Carrara countertops
• Behind Carrara for bathroom
• Carrara is Italy's attractions
• Carrara - artwork in progress
• Home of bulls
• Carrara workshops

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.
In the narrow bottomlands and across Carrara's coastal plain, about 10,000 workers process and ship 1.6 million tons of the stone per year. As local marble expert Lorenzo Marchini told me, the entire Carrara-Massa-Pietrasanta area is a vast, vertically integrated factory inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people whose history and livelihoods revolve around marble - and always have.
Nowhere else is the culture of marble so all-embracing. There are families here who have quarried or sculpted stone since at least the Middle Ages, for so many generations, in fact, that no one can keep count.
Specialized workers, their faces powdered with white dust, look like Michelangelo's Slaves come to life, and like them are only partially freed from the mountainsides. They talk passionately of "cultivating" (quarrying) their marble. As they stride down the city's stony streets, they point proudly to the mountains behind and exclaim, "Bello, bello!"
Driving into the mountains here is like visiting an archaeological dig. For one thing, the number of Carraresi directly involved in the marble trade today is about equal to that in Roman times. The prime difference is that under Augustus Caesar some 12 thousand locals were slaves, whereas their modern counterparts are well-paid, specialized craftsmen.
Surprisingly, the techniques the Romans used did not change much until after Michelangelo's day, and some were still in use within living memory.
The narrow, two-lane road that loops up from Carrara to Colonnata, for example, passes ancient quarries, blocks of weathered stone abandoned centuries ago and dozens of "sleigh paths" first used by the Romans to slide marble down from the mountains.
The Romans did not quarry the most accessible stones. They followed only the best veins of marble, even if it meant climbing to a 5,000-foot peak. In Roman times, marble was the stone of the emperors, prized both for its whiteness and the ease with which it could be sculpted. As the ultimate status symbol, no price - in money or human lives - was too high to pay for it.
Once a vein was discovered, slaves would drill holes or chisel V-shaped troughs at the stone's natural breaking points. They would pound in dried fig-wood stakes and wet them. The wet wood would expand, slowly cracking apart the marble blocks.
Loaded on sleighs made of tree trunks, the blocks were alternately dragged and braked by men with teams of oxen, following insanely steep sleigh routes. Slippery logs, coated with soap, were laid in front of the advancing sleigh, a juggernaut whose progress could never be fully halted.