Carrara Marble Quarries

Above the town of Carrara, in the Apuan Alps of northern Tuscany, three great basins of white marble have been quarried for more than two thousand years. The stone built imperial Rome and became the material of Michelangelo's David and Pietà. The quarries are still working, and the scale is startling: cut faces hundreds of metres high, hairpin roads for the transport lorries, and marble dust that turns the valley white. Guided four-wheel-drive tours run up to the Fantiscritti and Colonnata basins, and the village of Colonnata is where the celebrated lardo is aged in marble troughs.