Colonnata and Carrara's white marble

From "Slowtuscany": Stories about Tuscany by Damiano Andrei


I'd like to introduce you to a place in Tuscany, one of the most spectacular of the region and one of the least visited by mass tourism. It is the vast area that extends from Carrara to the border with Liguria. This area is mostly mountainous terrain, with high hills cultivated with vineyards and olives from which jagged peaks rise steeply – it’s the northern area of Versilia Lunigiana.

 

These are the tops of the Appuan Alps and they are snow white – whiter than white - even in August. It’s not snow that lends this remarkable colour to the peaks, but the marble from which they are made. Let’s stop at the marble quarries. It is a unique spectacle - if a bit harsh.  Entire mountains wounded, eviscerated by industrial-level excavation of the most prized and famous of Italy’s marble – the “Bianco di Carrara” shimmering to the point that you have to put on your sunglasses and already used widely in the first century AD at the outset of the Roman Empire.

 

In fact is was the first great Emperor of Rome, Cesear Augustus, to leave among his memoirs the following observation: “I found a city of wood and bricks and I left a city of marble”. The road to the quarries winds up the steep mountain in a series of switchbacks, the same road that over the last 2000 years has been trampled by the most illustrious architects and sculptors of Italy and indeed the world - Michelangelo Buonarroti, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Antonio Canova, just to mention a few.

 

Just above Carrara there is a tiny village, Colonnata, a town of 300 inhabitants perched on a rocky spur of marble tucked between the quarries. Today the town is famous for it’s “lardo”, a true delicacy of cured pork fat, but once it was the principle source of stone-cutters and miners who have worked to extract marble for hundreds of years. The village is old, with some abandoned houses. Many of the miners have been replaced by heavy machinery during the course of the 1900th century, forced to migrate to the valley in search of alternative work.

 

In every trattoria in town the unmissable Lardo di Colonnata (registered DOP quality mark) is served, but if you are searching for an old, typical bar you’ll find it in the church square, next to a trattoria. I found it by chance a couple of weeks ago. A bit dusty on first appearances, and entrance a tiny hole in the wall, the walls yellowed with the smoke of the miners’ cigarettes and a counter of the type that in Tuscany you never see any more, not even in photos.

While the other bars and restaurants were filled with people in their Sunday best there wasn’t a single soul in this bar other than an elderly woman seated at a table reading the paper. There was a bag of ice balanced on the knee of her right leg which was propped up on a chair. She got up and hurried to make me a coffee. It is said that the quality of coffee depends perhaps most of all on the coffee machine. The older the machine, the more full and rounded the taste. The coffee she made me was excellent, made in an expresso machine that at a guess dated from around the 1890s. I realised that I had an authentic representative of the place and its history before me, so I asked her a couple of questions. With an accent typical of this area, closed and closer to Ligurian than Tuscan, she told me that as a young girl she walked up to the mines every morning carrying food and drink for the miners. There were not any paths and she’d had to pick her way through mounds of discarded marble of the workings. She also carried a sack of sand that the miners mixed with water and used to saw strips of marble from the mountainside.

 

She showed me the black and white photos on the walls of the café, explaining that it took two men a full day’s work to cut 7-8 cms (3 inches).  It took months to cut and send a single block of marble.  With a fair share of bitterness the old lady added that with modern mining equipment the surrounding mountains were decimated daily, mined at a rate that she considered to be outright and unsustainable exploitation. “Go out into the square - she told me - and feel that mountain wind coming from the north. Before we never felt it because the mountains protected us from the cold winds. Now - she reflected - those mountains have almost disappeared”.

 

 

damiano.andreini@libero.it - www.intermezzieditore.it/slowtuscany