Fantiscritti Marble Quarries (Carrara)

Above Carrara the Apuan Alps look snow-capped all year, but the white is marble: whole mountainsides opened up in terraces, steps and sheer cut faces. Fantiscritti is one of the three historic marble basins of the area, alongside Torano and Colonnata, a deep valley where quarrying has gone on since Roman times and where the landscape is entirely man-made. Walls of stone sliced as cleanly as cake rise above the valley floor, blocks the size of houses wait to be carried down, and the scale of the work only becomes clear when a truck or an excavator appears against the white face like a toy.

The place owes its curious name to a Roman relief. In the third century AD, between about 203 and 212, quarrymen carved a small shrine into the rock wall showing three gods — Jupiter, Hercules and Bacchus — above a Latin dedication. Local people took the figures for children, fanti in the dialect, and the lettering below for writing, scritti: hence Fantiscritti. Over the centuries the carving became a register of visitors, and among the names scratched around its columns are those attributed to Giambologna and Antonio Canova, two of the sculptors who came to Carrara for its stone. The original has been kept since the 1860s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara; a copy marks its old place.

The valley also preserves the industrial chapter of the marble trade. The private marble railway of Carrara once climbed into the basins, and its route crosses the Ponti di Vara, a tiered stack of stone arches spanning the valley that now carries road traffic. The line's old station at Fantiscritti, closed in the 1960s, has become a museum of the quarries, and an open-air display at the foot of the faces follows the whole cycle of extraction, from pre-industrial methods to today's; a nineteenth-century crane that loaded the stone still stands nearby. Guided visits lead into galleries cut deep into the mountain, where marble is extracted underground in vast pale halls.

Getting there

The quarries lie in the hills about 3 km from the centre of Carrara, reached by road from the town towards the Fantiscritti and Colonnata basins; part of the approach runs through tunnels cut in the rock and over the Ponti di Vara. The nearest airport is Pisa International Airport (PSA), about 50 km away. Tours of the underground galleries and 4x4 trips into the open-cast quarries start at the Fantiscritti quarry entrance.