A Trip To Carrara Mountains in Italy

If you travel to Tuscany region in Italy, take a chance to visit Carrara, where one of the most luxurious marbles in the world is found. 

Visit to the quarries

Marble has been carved here since Ancient Roman times, and today it is recognised worldwide for its impeccable quality and beauty. The quarries stretch over 58 kilometres and they produce over 4 million tons of marble every year. A slab of Carrara marble can cost over 400 Euros per square meter. 

The roads here are very narrow and curvy. Every day hundreds of trucks loaded with tons of marble come down from the quarries. It is really dangerous and requires lots of driving skills, however incidents over the roads here are quite frequent. 

Producing Marble in Italy is very profitable, and no wonder that entering this business is really hard. However, today local factories face lots of competition from China and India, who even purchase the whole slabs to then cut them in the local factories, where of course, the labor force is much cheaper than in Europe. 

Normally, the slabs are just cut from the slopes of the mountains with the 5 mm diamond wire. This teqnique allows to cut the pieces of marble very precisely, in almost perfect square blocks. 

However, in order to get more rare marbles, the mountains sometimes are excavated from inside. For this reason you can see lots of tunnels. It is interesting to observe how mountain remains its height in fact being almost empty from inside. 

When you are in the quarries, take a chance to see a local museum of marble, where you can find lots it interesting information on how the marble has been produced here since ancient times, and how the technology has changed over the time.

Also you can have a meal in the restaurant in quarries – try local specialty called Lardo di Colonatta! 

Visit to Silvestri Marmi Factory

Around the quarries you can find lots of factories, big and small that produce various products from marble . We visited one of them which is called Silvestri Marmi. 

We had a chance to see how the blocks of marble are sliced into slabs using the most modern technologies and machines. Each slab is then polished several times with brushes of various diameters and rigidy. 

Silvestri Marmi is a family owned business, focused not only on producing traditional marble materials, but on innovation, and creating furniture and design objects in collaboration with world famous designers and architects. 

For example, they use this new innovative way of applying marble as a finishing material, which is called honeycomb, where a thin layer of marble is applied over a special substrate that actually resembles a honeycomb. This makes the material much lighter and allows to use marble over the ceilings.

Watch the video on our Youtube channel from our trip to Carrara: