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.In 1926 the primitive - and dangerous - sleigh technique was still being used. Mussolini's celebrated Monolith, now at the Foro Italico in Rome, was dragged by 60 oxen from the Carbonera quarry behind Carrara to Marina di Carrara's port. You can still see the spot from which it was detached - a 60-foot gash in the hillside. The 300-ton block is still the largest ever quarried, anywhere. Crazy as it may sound, sleighs and oxen only completely disappeared from Carrara in the 1960s, replaced by trucks.
Visit the quarries or Carrara's marble museum and you discover that the industry as a whole has been revolutionized in the last 40 years. Gone are the days when entire hillsides were dynamited, an appallingly destructive process used until World War II.
Nowadays, with diamond-wire cutting machines and other high-tech quarrying and processing equipment, experts say there is practically no waste. Marble discards are crushed to make the gravel or composite paving stones you see all over the world. Marble dust goes into glossy magazine paper and cosmetics, and is used as a filtering agent in anti-pollution scrubbers for smokestacks.
The arts, too, have been transformed by modern technology, though to a lesser extent than industry. Ever since Michelangelo's heyday at Carrara in the early 1500s, the area has been a magnet to sculptors, and scores of specialized workshops are still scattered around. Visit the modern SGF sculpture workshop on the edge of Torano, for instance, and you'll see skilled artisans using traditional chisels, rasps and calipers while others wield high-speed pneumatic tools.
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Signatures of Granites
Because of its hardness and comparative cheapness in relation to marble, granite is often used to make kitchen countertops. A granite countertop can be cut in any shape, and it is virtually unscratchable.
Kitchen Counters
The central island, positioned asymmetrically in the room, accommodates a structural column and contrasts its verticality with the intersecting planes of the dining and work counters.
Signatures of Granites
Because of its hardness and comparative cheapness in relation to marble, granite is often used to make kitchen countertops. A granite countertop can be cut in any shape, and it is virtually unscratchable.
Kitchen Counters
The central island, positioned asymmetrically in the room, accommodates a structural column and contrasts its verticality with the intersecting planes of the dining and work counters.