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| Credit: Andrea Ribolini |
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I had never seen anything
like this: from the air, the marble mountains in the three valleys of
Torano, Miseglia and Colonnata around Carrara in Tuscany look as though they
are covered in snow. From close up, the high vertical faces and giant benches
of the open cast excavations look like gigantic white cathedrals in a moonscape.
This is the world’s largest marble field, formed in the Apuan Alps over 200
million years. It is breath-taking.
The marble mountains have
been mined continuously since the Roman times: they provide the whitest and
most sought-after marble in the world.
Michelangelo selected stones for his iconic David and Pietà statues
there, and countless of other artists across centuries and continents have been
bewitched by this stone. The cathedrals of Florence and Siena, St Petersburg’s
Hermitage museum, the Marble Arch in London and Washington’s Kennedy Centre are
all made from this celebrated marble.
For centuries, the
marble has been the backbone of the region’s economy and its pride. But now, globalisation, market forces and new
excavation techniques have turned into a curse. An irreplaceable stone is being undersold, most of the small workshops where
marble was carved have disappeared, a rare craft is dying and the environment
is wrecked.
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| Credit: Andrea Ribolini |
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| Credit: Veronique Mistiaen |
This is a business with a yearly
turnover of between €700 and €800 millions, but the only beneficiaries are a
few powerful families and businesses, while the town is blighted by the side
effects of excavation – especially the dust and flooding. Despite its
extraordinary natural resources, Carrara, a town of 66,000 inhabitants, is one
of the poorest in Tuscany and one of the most heavily indebted in the country.
You can see the story I wrote with
Chiara Briganti, an academic, painter and native of Carrara, for Newsweek here.
It was a slippery and complex story,
which took us several years to research. It was nearly impossible to find
official figures on basic facts such as the number of people working in the
quarries and marble industry, the volume of excavation, the value of the stone
and so on. The more we learned, the murkier the story seemed to become. It felt
like all information around the marble industry was kept as nebulous as
possible, so people wouldn’t look too closely. And as locals say, “when someone
doesn’t want you to look too closely, it’s usually because the mafia is
involved.”
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| Credit: Andrea Ribolini |
During the few years we reported on
the story, we could clearly see the terrible toll mining was exacting on the
mountains: peaks were chopped off (although quarrying is prohibited above
1,200m), the shape of the mountains irreversibly altered, the water sources
contaminated, the river white and swollen with marble debris.
As an outsider, it was hard to
understand why the city allowed this level of reckless excavation to happen and
why citizens didn’t boot them out of
office. Everyone I asked, always replied: “This is Italy” – meaning that a
combination of corruption, inertia, respect for traditions and
fear of the marble barons and the mafia maintained the status quo.
Lately, though, a growing number of locals,
environmental groups, academics and artists have united under the banner of
“Salviamo le Apuane” (Save the Apuan Alps), organizing rallies, petitions and demonstrations – and they are gaining
momentum. But whenever they seem to be
achieving some success, it is taken away…
