Il Dolce Viaggio: Carrara and Lucca

From La Spezia we took the autostrada back in the direction of Parma. Just before we crossed the Magra again we saw a colorful and intriguing village that covered a hilltop. A few days earlier we might have detoured to explore it but after Cinque Terre we were temporarily overloaded on scenic villages. I looked it up later and learned the village was Vezzano Ligure, and there was hardly anything written about it online. Perhaps we'll stop by on our next visit to Liguria.

After crossing the river we switched onto the autostrada that ran parallel to the shoreline for about fifteen minutes until we came to the turn-off for Carrara. If the name sounds familiar it's probably because ever since the Romans dug the first quarries there Carrara has become nearly synonymous with marble. Marble is a metamorphic rock formed by exposure of calcium carbonate-based sedimentary rocks like limestone and dolomite to extreme pressure and heat. The swirls and striations of colored marble generally result from silicate impurities in the original substrate, while uniformly white marble is derived from exceptionally pure limestone. Marble has been considered an ideal stone for sculpture since antiquity due to its unique combination of softness and durability, along with its slight translucency due to subsurface light scattering. The Greeks of the Classical Period brought marble statuary to prominence and then the Romans specialized in marble reproductions of Greek bronzes. In many cases these reproductions are the only versions of these classical Greek works that still remain. The marble sculptures that we are most familiar with were created during the Italian Renaissance, including Michelangelo's David. Michelangelo was a frequent visitor to the Carrara quarries and David was hewn from Carrara marble, although that block was not sourced by Michelangelo himself. As we entered the town we were greeted by a marble statue of a quarryman in bas relief by the side of the road.

To reach the quarries we drove up a winding road where the evidence of an active industry was all around us. Trucks passed by us carrying enormous blocks of stone and the sides of the Apuan Alps were white with exposed marble. It was impossible to determine where the clouds of chalky dust ended and the mist began.

Once we reached the quarry we learned that there were two companies offering tours. One would take us to the upper level of the quarry on a Range Rover, allowing us to watch the process of cutting and extracting the marble and potentially offering amazing views over the surrounding countryside. This tour unfortunately would not depart for another hour. The second tour involved being driven into a cavern inside the mountain and didn't require us to wait quite as long. Of course we wouldn't get any views inside the cavern but the woman selling the second tour told us it was too cloudy to see anything from the top of the mountain anyway. We bought her pitch and passed the half hour until the tour started in the gift shop and the little museum. We weren't tempted by the tourist prices in the gift shop and figured we would probably get better deals in the town.

The van brought us into a large cavern that the tour operators had named the Marble Cathedral. The owners of the quarry had hired a well-known Italian street artist to create a reproduction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on one the the cavern's imposing walls. It was a little hard to focus on the surroundings because of the enormous front loaders that were passing within a few feet of us. I was constantly surveying the kids to make sure they were well inside the perimeter of the group.

Blocks of marble were historically cleaved from the solid mass by inserting wooden pegs into naturally occurring cracks and then making them swell by soaking them in water. In modern times holes are drilled into the stone through which a wire loop with diamond-studded collars is threaded and attached to an electric motor, which then powers the wire to saw rapidly through the marble. Our guide gave us a good overview of the process as well as the reasons for the different colors and patterns seen in marble. At the end of the tour we were offered a tasting of a spumante that had been aged in the cavern for several years, for an additional price of course, but we declined. A romantic environment for the tasting had been established within an arch-shaped tunnel inside the quarry.

We probably should have eaten lunch before the quarry but I was worried because I hadn't booked ahead and wasn't sure of the hours. Now it was already almost two o'clock on a Monday in a town that wasn't very touristy. We hastily drove back down the mountain to the old town of Carrara, just making one quick stop to enjoy the view from the shoulder of the road. Old Carrara is seven kilometers inland but we could see how over time the town had enlarged and extended all the way to the Mediterranean. Marina di Carrara is at the northern end of a long strip of seaside towns and resorts called the Versilia Riviera that extends all the way south to Viareggio.

Carrara was drab and mostly devoid of energy in the mid afternoon. The buildings had the typical stained and faded yellowish plaster finishes of Italian working class neighborhoods. The window sills were grimy and there was plenty of exposed piping and wiring on display. As I feared the first two restaurants that should have been open were not, with one appearing to be permanently shuttered. I pulled to the curb to regroup and discovered a Chinese restaurant just a block away that people seemed to like. Italian fare didn't have many surprises left for us anyway and Mei Ling's native cuisine always seems to put her in a good mood. When we walked in there were no customers and I feared they had already closed the kitchen, but they sat us without any hesitation and served up surprisingly authentic Chinese dishes for a mid-size blue collar town in northern Italy. I ate a little more of the oily and spicy food than I should have and felt slightly queasy for the rest of the afternoon.

After lunch we decided to see if we could find some marble souvenirs at better prices than we had seen at the gift shop at the quarry. We had passed a place called Fiorella Marmi on the way up the mountain and we decided to give that a try. It was a cool place with a yard full of marble statues and an old locomotive with flatbed cars holding marble blocks. When we arrived the door was locked even though it should have been open according to the hours on the sign. As we were peering through the windows into the showroom the owner drove into the yard and opened the doors for us. There was a lot of beautiful stuff but we didn't want to deal with shipping so we bought Cleo a bracelet of marble beads and called it a day.

Our earlier experience with the town of Carrara hadn't been very encouraging but it seemed like we hadn't been in the true historical center. We parked as close as we could to the pedestrianized zone and walked in past a marble statue of Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the fathers of Italian unification. The flagstone-paved centro storico was much more colorful and atmospheric than the dreary blocks surrounding it but just as deserted.

The focal point of the centro storico is Piazza Alberica, a former cattle market that was redesigned in the sixteenth century to be the centerpiece of a modernized city. The large rectangular piazza is normally occupied only by a nineteenth century marble fountain depicting Maria Beatrice d'Este, the last independent sovereign of Massa and Carrara, but it is frequently taken over by temporary sculptural installations. On the day we visited there were a number of marble renderings of iconic Italian designs on display at regular intervals along the long axis of the rectangle. On the periphery of the piazza there were solid lines of three-to-five story buildings with plaster facades in a variety of warm colors. The most ornate was the eighteenth century baroque Palazzo Del Medico, once owned by a wealthy family of quarry owners. In the background of the square are the foothills of the Apuan Alps with the scars of quarrying clearly visible.

The most notable sight in Carrara after Piazza Alberica is the city's cathedral, constructed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when black and white striping was the dominant theme in Tuscany and Liguria. In terms of size and design the facade and nave really couldn't compare to the duomos of Genoa and Milan, but the campanile was truly unique and remarkable. At first glance it seemed unfinished because the smooth marble facade is missing from the two lower levels, except for the corners. After a few moments of contemplation it became clear that this design was intentional to display that at least the lower levels of the tower were entirely built with marble ashlar, rather than cheaper stone or brick with marble cladding. The bell tower is essentially a monument to marble in the city that exists because of marble. It would be easy to imagine that the statue of the Madonna in the small garden at the base of the belltower dates back to the original construction, but in fact it is a twenty-first century creation of a Thai sculptor from Carrara marble that was donated to the cathedral. The original village of Carrara developed around the first church to be built at this site, an early Middle Ages predecessor of the cathedral. Previously there was nothing except for an intersection of thoroughfares between the sea, the quarries, and the historical territory of Lunigania to the northwest.

Before leaving the area of Carrara we drove down through bland and modern residential and commercial neighborhoods until we reached the marina area. We thought we might find a pleasant seaside atmosphere but there was just a wide, unsightly boulevard separating the residential area form the coast. I didn't realize it at the time but we were next to the port and the beach was just to our west. One pleasant surprise was the vacant blocks that were packed with orderly rows of majestic umbrella pines. Their delicately curving trunks created a lattice through which we could glimpse the mountains in the background. As we drove eastward out of Carrara we had one final glorious view of the Apuan Alps and the white treasure that had been reaped from them for two thousand years.

I was excited about Lucca because it is known for having the best preserved town walls in Italy. I had an image of a classic medieval walled city but once we had negotiated a surprising amount of traffic to reach Porta San Pietro I was underwhelmed. The gate itself was tall and beautiful but the brick walls on either side were rather featureless and lower than I had expected. I had seen much more impressive walls in the similarly named city of Lugo in Spain, just to name one example. The important distinction I had missed between Lucca's walls and those of other Tuscan cities was that Lucca's were reconstructed during the Renaissance to better resist cannon fire. Medieval walls were tall and relatively thin to defend against climbing and arrows, but they could be easily demolished by cannon. Lucca's fortifications are much lower and thicker, more like embankments, which made for a better defense but doesn't deliver the same wow factor for twenty-first century tourists. The walls are mainly used in the present day as a bike bath which runs along the circumference of the old city.

We found a parking spot just inside the walls, which was as far as we could proceed since the entire walled city is a ZTL. It was a ten minute walk to the Airbnb with all the luggage but as there were five of us it wasn't too much of a struggle. When I wasn't focused on dragging the wheels of the big bag over the flagstones I could see that the old town was quite charming and medieval in appearance. The fourteenth century Guinigi Tower loomed over the city and was visible from most of the intersections near the center. My early planning had allowed us to book one of Lucca's best Airbnb's, a beautiful two bedroom apartment in an old building right on Piazza dell'Anfiteatro with a bedroom window that looked directly outward into the elliptical piazza from the second level. Once we had deposited our luggage and freshened up, we immediately rushed back downstairs to take in the atmospheric space that was once the site of a Roman amphitheater. The piazza is now ringed by a solid wall of apartment buildings with similar facades of pale yellow and varying heights. The ground floor of almost every building is occupied by restaurants that offer al fresco seating in the periphery of the piazza.

Although there were settlements in the area of Lucca dating back to antiquity, the city itself was founded by the Romans. Aside from the amphitheater there are traces of the ancient Roman forum and theater in other piazzas within the walled city. In the early Middle Ages Lucca became affluent from the silk trade and attracted many visitors due to its position on the Via Francigena pilgrimage route. During this period of prosperity and religious fervor several enormous and ornate churches were constructed, most notably the Cathedral of San Martino and the San Michele in Foro church. When we walked into the Piazza San Michele, the former site of the Roman forum, I mistook the church for the cathedral. The most remarkable aspect of the marble facade was the four levels of intricate loggias that were stacked above the austere lower section. The builders employed a dizzying variety of colors and shapes among the multiple rows of columns with some patterns being easily discernible and others more obscure. There was only one row of columns running lengthwise along the nave and these had a more basic and uniform design.

We had to interrupt our exploration of Lucca for dinner. The oiliness of our lunch had left me with a diminished appetite, a great opportunity to skip a meal and keep the day's caloric intake at an acceptable level. I ate a salad while Mei Ling and the kids indulged in their usual north Italian favorites at a popular outdoor place that we were lucky to find open on a Monday evening.

After dinner we strolled through the streets and piazzas of the old town and found it not not unlike the older parts of other Italian cities we had already visited, such as Cagliari and Genoa and Parma. The people seated at the outdoor tables of the cafes and bars looked like they were comfortably settled in for a late evening. We came across a good-sized crowd seated in front of a stage and hoped we might have stumbled on a play or a musical performance but it turned out to be some kind of a public talk of which we were naturally unable to understand a word.

On the way back to Piazza dell'Anfiteatro we made a conscious effort to locate the narrowest and emptiest alleys that we could have to ourselves. This was easier than we had thought as this part of the town was much less busy than the part we had left. Here the streets were like man-made canyons with imposing unbroken walls of tall buildings and mysterious, antiquated archways. Our ten day leg through Tuscany seemed to be off to a very good start.