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The extraction of white and coloured marbles in the Apuan Alps began in the pre-Roman epoch and went on without a break for over two thousand years. Notices by writers in the Roman age and archaeological testimonies – traces of pickaxe cuts, semifinished manufactured and inscribed articles, sculptures, ceramics and coins – document the fact that the Carrara marble basin was at the centre of intense exploitation beginning from the Roman epoch. The marble quarrying and the marble trade took place through the Luni colony founded in 177 BC, which had a port at the mouth of the river Magra. From the 1st century AD the emperor himself took control of the quarries and Luni marbles were widely employed in sculpture, architecture and the decoration of public and private buildings in Rome and many places in the Mediterranean, alongside or replacing famous Greek marbles. The quarry probably owes its name to the “amphitheatre” shape it took on due to quarrying activities.

The extraction of white and coloured marbles in the Apuan Alps began in the pre-Roman epoch and went on without a break for over two thousand years. Notices by writers in the Roman age and archaeological testimonies – traces of pickaxe cuts, semifinished manufactured and inscribed articles, sculptures, ceramics and coins – document the fact that the Carrara marble basin was at the centre of intense exploitation beginning from the Roman epoch. The marble quarrying and the marble trade took place through the Luni colony founded in 177 BC, which had a port at the mouth of the river Magra. From the 1st century AD the emperor himself took control of the quarries and Luni marbles were widely employed in sculpture, architecture and the decoration of public and private buildings in Rome and many places in the Mediterranean, alongside or replacing famous Greek marbles. The quarry probably owes its name to the “amphitheatre” shape it took on due to quarrying activities. It gives greylight-blue marble reminiscent of the quality described by the geographer Strabo (V, 2, 5) together with the white Luni marble. On the site at the end of the nineteenth century there still lay semi-finished manufactured articles with inscriptions, and in the last century iron tools were found as well as a figurine of the goddess Luna, probably intended for a small place of cult of the quarrymen; this is now exhibited at the Carrara Marble Museum. On the walls of quarry the traces can still be seen of big cuts made with pickaxes and some engraved initials. T he name Fantiscritti refers to a steep gully rich in ordinary big-grained white marble, its colour tending to cerulean, in the Miseglia marble basin. Despite intense exploitation there are still big traces of the quarrying done in the Roman epoch. From a quarry 600 metres above sea level there comes the relief of the Fantiscritti, once graven on the wall of the quarry itself, as is documented by the splendid drawings done in the nineteenth century by Salvioni and moved in the middle of the century to the Carrara Fine Arts Academy. In the relief the emperors of the Severan family (beginning of the 3rd century AD) are represented as Jupiter, Hercules and Dionysus in an aedicule. In the past it was the object of reverential pilgrimages by travellers, scholars and famous artists like Giambologna and Canova, who engraved their signatures there.

Carrara

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