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.
Since antiquity, marble discards and dust have been accumulating on the Apuan Alps' craggy slopes, which are arranged in an amphitheater around Carrara. The town is synonymous with stone. Local experts boasted to me that the strangely beautiful torrents of marble - visible for miles around - will go on spilling from these mountains forever.
Forever? Maybe: Trajan's Column was wrenched by Roman slaves from the Fantiscritti quarry high above the Colonnata Valley (so named because its marble is ideal for columns). The site still yields milky-white stone today. Methodically chipping, blasting and carving since at least the first century B.C., armies of marble workers have so far unearthed only a fraction of the billions of tons of stone cradled in the Apuan Alps.
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Granite Terrace
The maple base cabinets in the wet bar are topped with black granite, which follows the angle of the stairs and ends in a seven-sided, cherry-based counter table.
Stone and Marble
Think about the visual impact of a countertop. In a cold climate, you may want to stay away from stones such as marble and granite, which tend to appear cold.
The maple base cabinets in the wet bar are topped with black granite, which follows the angle of the stairs and ends in a seven-sided, cherry-based counter table.
Stone and Marble
Think about the visual impact of a countertop. In a cold climate, you may want to stay away from stones such as marble and granite, which tend to appear cold.