The Carrara marble quarries are one of Italy’s most striking natural and industrial sights: white walls opening up among the mountains of the Apuan Alps, cut by switchback roads and shaped by two thousand years of human work. Anyone seeing them for the first time finds it hard to believe it isn’t snow, but pure marble, still extracted today with techniques perfected over the centuries.
Two Thousand Years of White Marble
Marble extraction in Carrara dates back to Roman times: the earliest documented quarries were already active in the 1st century BC, when the white stone of the Apuan Alps began reaching Rome to build temples, columns and monuments. The activity has never stopped since. Today open-air quarries, with terraces cut into the rock at different altitudes, exist alongside underground galleries, where marble is extracted in settings that resemble a mine more than a traditional quarry.
The Marble Chosen by Michelangelo
No name is as tied to Carrara marble as that of Michelangelo Buonarroti, who personally selected the blocks that would become some of his most celebrated sculptures. The artist climbed up into the Apuan quarries himself, more than once, to pick out the best blocks, without relying on intermediaries: a level of care that shows just how exceptional the quality of this marble was — and still is. Since then it has been chosen by sculptors and architects around the world, right up to the present day.
How to Visit the Quarries Today
The best-known quarries, such as those in the Fantiscritti and Colonnata basins, can be visited on guided tours, often aboard off-road vehicles, which take visitors deep among the marble terraces and, in some cases, into galleries still in use today. It’s an experience that blends landscape and industrial history: you travel between white walls dozens of metres high, while guides explain the cutting techniques, from the helicoidal wire to traditional methods. Nearby, the village of Colonnata — also known for its lardo, cured in marble basins — tells the everyday story of those who have always worked on this mountain.
An Experience to Live While Travelling
The Carrara quarries are one of the stops on our Tuscany to Discover tour, four days in a small group combining the marble of the Apuan Alps with the walls of Lucca and an evening at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago. A journey designed for those who want to see one of Tuscany’s most iconic landscapes up close, unhurried and in the company of just a few other people.
