The dark side of Michelangelo’s white marble

 

Credit: Andrea Ribolini

--> 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. 

Credit: Andrea Ribolini

 

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.”

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…