Ay, Carrara!

Marble comes from mountains. Today, we visited the mountains from which the best marble comes. The place where Michelangelo hand-picked his slabs. The cliffs of Carrara.
But first, a quick stop in Pietrasanta, one town over and a few hundred feet further down. Pietrasanta, "sand stone," has become a bit of a sculptors' colony because marble is so cheap there. The town's dramatic backdrop is the Apuan Alps, which have been providing the world with beautiful white marble for the past 3,000 years. Marble is made of condensed shell, bone, and such -- or as our chipper British tour guide put it, "If we were to die right now and sink to the bottom of the sea, we would eventually become marble."
Said chipper tour guide gave us an inside look at one of the area's sculpture workshops. The men who chip away at the slabs of stone here aren't artists per se, but artisans -- very skilled at their craft of carving, but they carry out others' commissioned designs. During the night, however, I'm told many slave away over their own artistic visions.

Love the paper hat. 

A thin layer of snowy white marble dust covered everything -- the kind of dust that ends up in our tooth paste and parmesan cheese because it's rich in calcium carbonate.

The mosaic makers were in the next shop over, busy working with Venetian glass. Walking into the studio was like stepping into Olivander's Wand Shop, except the rows upon rows of dusty brown boxes were packed with bright squares of glittering glass, rather than phoenix feather-filled wands (yay for Harry Potter references). 

Curly Hair in the back corner also models for Giorgio

Armani. No Joke. His mosaic-making specialty is lively-

colored skin tones.

At midday, we all piled back on the bus for the 30-minute ride to the mines of Carrara. Up a steep incline, through a tunnel, and the next thing I knew we were out of the tunnel and it looked as though the bottom had fell out from beneath the bus. There was nothing anchoring us to either side except a thin asphalt bridge stretched across the deep ravine. And in front -- the Carrara marble quarry.

In the winter, if you look up at the mountain you can't tell where the marble ends and the snow begins. The mountain is too steep to build big hair-pin turns for the marble-toting trucks to travel on, so special zig-zag roads have been built so that a truck travels forward up the first zig, then reverses and travels up the next zag while facing backwards. We did not travel on the zig-zag road.

This quarry is unique in that the miners cut away the marble from the inside out, rather than cutting into the mountainside. This means we got to travel INTO a mountain -- after a brief trip through an underground tunnel, we stepped out of the vans into giant gray caves of solid stone. The marble is so porous that the day's steady rainfall dripped down to the quarry floor, turning the marble dust into gray mud. Damp, cold, and dead-silent, like Peter Jackson's vision of the Mines of Moria (an HP and LOTR reference in one post, too much?) 

Look Ma, I'm in a marble quarry!

We took a brief tour and snapped funny pictures of each other standing in front of heavy machinery before heading back up to the earth's surface. I didn't leave without first snatching up a little piece of renegade marble, though. I stuck it in my pocket, where it stayed the whole bus ride back, cold and gleaming like crystal.