Italian marble is considered among the world’s best. Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Donatello used marble to create masterpieces of eternal beauty. Italians have always been regarded as masters of marble extraction and processing. All over the world, throughout the centuries, Italian marble has been used to make works of art and architecture. As a result, Italian marble has become a synonym for luxury and elegance. If you love this material and are curious to discover its history, consider joining marble tours in prestigious places like Carrara and Portovenere!
What we admire as pristine white stone – marble – was born hundreds of millions of years ago in overwhelming darkness. Countless generations of tiny creatures lived, died and drifted slowly to the bottom of a primordial sea, where their bodies were slowly compressed by gravity, layer upon layer upon layer, tighter and tighter, until eventually they all congealed and petrified into the interlocking white crystals we know as marble. “Marmo,” the Italians call it — an oddly soft, round word for such a hard and heavy material. Some eons later, tectonic jostling raised a great spine of mountains in southern Europe. Up went the ancient sea floor, and the crystallized creatures went with it.
[The Majestic Marble Quarries of Northern Italy By Luca Locatelli and Sam Anderson on nytimes.com]
Marble tour in Portovenere
Have you ever heard of Portoro? It’s a rare and beautiful black marble extracted in the Gulf of Poets, especially around Portovenere, since Roman times. You can learn more about this prestigious material in the article Portoro marble: Portovenere’s authentic black stone, which also explains the hiking tours around the ancient marble quarries.
Carrara Marble Tours
If you are staying in Portovenere you can easily organize a day trip to Carrara and explore the spectacular Apuan Alps to get to know one of the most precious marbles in the world. The use of these marble quarries dates back as far as the Iron Age. Carrara Marble is found in all the most important museums, palaces and churches in Italy, and it was sculpted by the greatest artists of history, such as Donatello, Michelangelo and Bernini.
The Carrara Marble Experience includes a guided tour of a quarry where ancient and modern methods for the extraction of marble are explained. You will be amazed by more than 2000 years of history of the quarries where Michelangelo would personally choose the blocks for his masterpieces. Afterwards, you will stop in the town of Colonnata to taste the famous local lardo and learn the secrets of its production. The excursion ends with a visit at a sculpture workshop where a craftsman explains “the art of removing” to give life to marble objects and statues.
Grand Hotel Portovenere offers its guests the Carrara Marble Tour experience, which lasts around 7 hours (including the round-trip transfers). The luxury hotel near Cinque Terre also pays tribute to the territory with its “Between Liguria & Tuscany” Amenities Line, featuring drink rocks, glass coasters, and salt and pepper shakers made with local black and white marble.
Sources:
“Portoro, the black and gold Italian marble” article in Rendiconti Lincei. Scienze Fisiche e Naturali by Fratini, F., Pecchioni, E., Cantisani, E. et al. Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei (2015) 26: 415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-015-0420-7
Perché il marmo italiano è tra i migliori al mondo https://www.marmomac.com/
