Michelangelo's Mountain

You may stray onto a side road lined, like backroads everywhere in Italy, with household gardens and little farms, and view the peaks through an improbable scrim of semi-tropical palms, limes, and pomegranates. At Carrara you’ll see a break in the hills and a narrow valley, speckled with the red roofs of the town, pushing up into the mountains like a wedge. Or a chisel. As the numbers tell it, these Alpi Apuane are modest: the tallest, Monte Pisanino, stands only 1,946 meters (6,385 feet) high.

But perception lies in the context; the Apuan Alps jut rudely toward the sea, jamming like a boot into the long coastal plane that rolls all the way south to Naples, and shoot up impossibly straight and sheer from near-sea level. Nature made these peaks steep, and human labors have made them steeper still. And they gleam, white like Rainier or the Matterhorn, even in summer, when snow is no more thinkable here than it would be in Bangkok. Down their slopes, as though about to engulf the city at their feet, stream glaciers of an even brighter white.
This “snow” follows the eighteen-mile ridge of the Apuan Alps, essentially an enormous fissured block of marble. The valleys and foothills and most of the lower slopes are skinned over with dirt, brambles, chestnut trees, and the occasional picturesque village, but the higher, steeper reaches stand as stark and white as the walls of an ancient temple, or a statue in a piazza. It is a sort of negative image: if these were your usual snow-covered granite mountains, their steepest faces would be bare rock. It is a spectacle that does not cease to amaze, even when you see it every day, on your way to buy bread and drink coffee: exhilarating, baffling, alarming by turns. This is not the cozy Tuscany so beloved of writers, tourism promoters, and wealthy retirees. It is its own land, brooding and hard but intoxicated with art, steeped in tradition and yet unstable as a landslide. “It’s never the same,” a shopowner named Oreste Morescalchi muses one day as he lolls outside his little gallery (appropriately named Pietra Viva, “Living Stone”) in Carrara’s centro storico , gazing at the slice of Apuan silhouette that appears between a break in the medieval buildings. People everywhere say that about their locales, but here they can prove it empirically; Morescalchi is charting the progress of the cavatori who are cutting and reshaping the mountains even as we speak. The spectacle is at once ghastly and beautiful. “It’s horrible what we’re doing to the mountains,” says Mario Venutelli, who heads the Carrara chapter of the history and conservation society Italia Nostra. “There are twenty unique varieties of orchid growing up there, and look what we’re doing!”

These little big mountains loom behind every vista in Carrara, framed by the now-decaying palaces of the quarry owners who grew rich off them, by the incongruous palms, by the many marble monuments and heroic statues—chips off the old block—that speckle the city. They play tricks with your senses of scale and perspective. The spectacle overwhelmed Michelangelo Buonarroti, a man not ordinarily taken with the marvels of non-human nature, and inspired a vision that dwarfed even his usual ambitions. Breathing the high air as he tramped up and down seeking the right stone for his art, he dreamed of carving the marble mountaintop itself into a personal Mount Rushmore, four centuries before power tools made such projects feasible. He never attempted this grandiose project. But after his first visit to the marble mountains, this artist who had before produced only ordinary-sized works began undertaking enormous projects—the David, the tomb of Pope Julius II, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the San Lorenzo Church façade—such as had never been seen before. In the marble mountains above Carrara, he learned to think big.

The Carrarese tell various tales about how all this marble came to be here. I heard one from Don Raffaello Monsantini, monsignore of Carrara’s Duomo di Sant’Andrea. It seems God had almost finished making the world when he grew tired. He called two angels, one smart and one not, and directed them to finish the last bit of work yet to be done on the Italian peninsula: take sacks of ore, granite, marble, and other mountain-building materials and spread them evenly. “I’ll start at Venice and make the Alps,” the clever angel told the dunce. “You start at Genoa and make the Appenines.” But the dumb angel dozed off at the first beach he found (which is Carrara’s—all the shore to the north is rock). He woke in a panic, and dropped all his marble in a heap. “What have you done with all this precious marble?” God thundered, but then He smiled. “Maybe it’s not so bad. Now sculptors will come from all over the world and make sculptures for me.”

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As minerals go, marble is nothing special. It occurs in scores of places around the world—most commonly along the Mediterranean rim but also in France, Belgium, Brazil, China, and India, and in the states of Georgia, Colorado, and Vermont. But nowhere is it so concentrated as in the Apuan Alps—an eighty-square-mile oval bed of unusually pure calcium carbonate a quarter mile or more thick, a quarter of it thrusting right through to the surface.
Ordinarily, quarrying is a superficial business: the beds lie beneath the hills or plains and the quarriers dig them up, in a sort of strip or pit mining. The Apuan Alps present more varied and dramatic challenges: the same continental collisions that provided the gigantic hot press needed to form this stone also tossed it up in a precipitous jagged jumble of peaks and valleys; blink and you can think you’re in the North Cascades, the youngest, steepest peaks in forty-eight U.S. states. To get the good stone from such forbidding terrain, the quarriers have tunneled beneath the mountains and dug out underground gallerie the size of stadiums, peeled them away from bottom to top, holed them like Swiss cheese, scraped and penetrated them from every side. In the old days, before heavy trucks and steam shovels and front loaders assumed the job, this precipitated the evolution of a whole set of daredevil specialists: minatori, experts at setting explosive mines to tear away what they did not pulverize of the mountain’s marble skin; tecchiaioli, human flies who, with simple ropes wrapped around their waists, would descend the sheer quarry faces with heavy steel bars to knock away the outcrops and residual clutter that might otherwise fall and brain their comrades; lizzatori, sledmen who could ease nearly thirty tons of marble strapped on wooden runners down rubbled sixty-degree chutes; and mollatori, masters at playing out the ropes and cables on which their comrades’ lives depended. The danger and the proud specialization of these jobs shaped a culture that still sets Carrara apart from the rest of the world—and, it often seems, from ordinary reality.
Even some of its streets, and many more downtown sidewalks, are paved with smooth bianco di Carrara marble, a welcome respite for the feet after the rough cobblestones of Florence. Surplus blocks, each hand-squared in a honeycomb pattern of chisel marks, fill extra spaces in Carrara’s rough stone walls. The Torrente Carrione that runs, sometimes a trickle and sometimes a fearsome flood, from the cave through the city’s heart, is a watery museum of quarry waste. Incongruous white chips and pebbles and, after a surge, small boulders cover its bed and sometimes yield treasures. Robert Gove, an American sculptor who has lived monkishly in Carrara for more than thirty years, laboriously shaping and polishing exquisitely refined abstract forms, doesn’t need to buy his stone (a good thing, since he has a hard time finishing his sculptures to his own satisfaction and putting them up for sale). He finds it in the streambed. He also finds half-worked pieces, cut-out negative forms, and stones of indecipherable provenance but such wise balance you’d think some neo-constructivist mountain troll had taken a chisel to them. He has accumulated what is in effect a shrine to the stone, a museum of found marble art, whose gritty surfaces set off the polished arcs and ripples of his own work. Gove is not the only one; everybody who works with marble seems to have the soul of a rockhound, to be a scrounger and a collector; the entry to the bustling stoneyard of Barratini Marmi, a.k.a. Cave Michelangelo, one of Carrara’s larger marble companies, is lined with Roman trophies. But it’s from Gove that I catch the vice. After I leave his studio, I find my eyes straying over the stones in the ditches along the road; I cannot cross any of the endless bridges over the Carrione and the tributaries that wind like noodles through the town without peering over, hoping for some lapidary masterpiece in the rough. Occasionally I give in, at one of the rare unfenced accesses to the streams, and scrounge the banks and channels. The closest thing to a treasure I could find was a river-worn chunk of bianco, thickly grown with algae and inscribed with two cryptic symbols, like a beehive or an arched window with double mullions, on my first try. I accumulate curiosities, mill ends gashed by saw blades and drilled half-through. They fill the window sill and spill onto the desk and floor. I pretend they are here to serve as bookends and candleholders, and idle away my time tracing their grain and wear and crystal structures.”