Colonnata, Carrara, and the Marble Mines | The White Mountain And The Fat

Colonnata, Carrara, and the white mountain that feeds them.

The road that goes up to Colonnata ends at Colonnata, and you understand this only when you arrive, because the village sits on a shelf of the mountain that the road was built to reach, and there is nowhere else for the road to go. I had driven up from the coast on a Tuesday in late spring with the windows open, the smell of the sea giving way after about ten minutes to a different smell, drier, mineral, the smell of a place where rock is being cut, and by the time I parked I had been climbing for almost an hour through a series of switchbacks past quarries that opened off the road like wounds, white inside, the white going down further than I could see.

From Marina di Pietrasanta, where I live, you can see these quarries every day if you walk far enough out on the pontile at Tonfano and turn around. The Versilia coast is a long, flat strip of beach with the Apuan Alps rising behind it, and on certain mornings, the snow on the Apuans is not snow but marble, and the slopes that look like ski runs are ravaneti, the white spill of waste rock that the quarrymen leave behind. You can live here for a long time and not register that what you are looking at every morning is the inside of a mountain that has been opened and is being eaten.

I had come up to eat fat.

This is, in my limited defense, the way a Hungarian thinks. Where I come from we cure pork fat in paprika and garlic and we eat it raw on bread with raw onion and we consider this a form of national accomplishment, and I had been told for two years by everyone around me in Versilia that the lardo of Colonnata was the best cured fat in Italy, possibly in the world, and that the people of Colonnata had been making it the same way for as long as anyone could remember.

Miners, the people on the coast called them, though the men who work the marble are not miners, and the word in Italian is cavatore, quarryman, the man who cuts the stone open. The cavatori of these mountains have been eating lardo since at least the Roman period, when they almost certainly invented it for the practical reason that they needed something dense and cheap and energetic to take to work, and pork fat keeps if you salt it heavily and tuck it somewhere cold, and the inside of a marble cave is cold all year. The local method, refined over centuries and now protected by an IGP designation, is to layer the fat with rosemary, garlic, pepper, and other spices that no producer will tell you about completely, and to pack it into rectangular tubs cut from a particular kind of local marble called conca, and to leave it there for at least six months, sometimes a year, in a cool dark room. The marble does something to the fat that wood or steel does not do. The cavatori figured this out a thousand years before anyone wrote a book about flavor.

Colonnata itself takes about fifteen minutes to walk. It is built on a steep slope, the houses leaning into one another along three or four narrow streets, and on the wall of one of those streets, just below a window with a row of geraniums, someone had painted in faded red the words Via degli Anarchici, the street of the anarchists, with a small hammer and sickle next to the lettering. I stopped to read it. I have read enough about the history of this corner of Italy to know that when an anarchist symbol goes up on a wall in a Carrara village, it is not a tourist gesture, and it is not nostalgia.

The anarchist movement in Italy, one of the largest and oldest such movements anywhere, was founded by the men who cut these mountains. The Federazione Anarchica Italiana, the FAI, was founded in Carrara in September 1945, in the months after the Liberation, by men who had spent the war fighting in the Apuan Alps with the partisans and who came down off the mountain with an idea about how to live afterward. That history is not in a museum here. It is on the wall of a side street, painted by hand, next to someone’s geraniums.

I ate at a small place on one of the streets above the parking lot. I had walked past it twice before going in because it looked like the kind of room that would not have a menu in English and might not have one at all, and this turned out to be correct. There were four tables. The man behind the counter was probably my age, working a slicer in the slow, careful way of someone who has done it for thirty years, and when I asked for the lardo pasta, he nodded once, said cinque minuti, and turned away. I sat down. There was a woman at the next table eating by herself, no phone, a glass of red wine, and a plate of something with greens in it, and she looked at me once and went back to her food. The man brought a basket of bread first and then, after about the five minutes he had promised, a plate of penne tossed in nothing more than its own starch and a generous shaving of lardo melted into it from the heat of the pasta, with a few grains of black pepper and what looked like a single small leaf of rosemary on top. He did not bring cheese. He did not offer cheese. There are dishes in Italy where cheese is an active offense and this was one of them.

The fat had dissolved into the pasta and the pasta was not a vehicle for sauce, it was a vehicle for fat, and the fat tasted of pork and rosemary and garlic and salt and something I can only call mineral, the same word that came back to me when I had smelled the air on the way up, the taste of cool stone where something had rested for a long time. I have eaten fat my whole life. I have eaten my grandmother’s zsír on toasted bread in winter, with raw onion and pickle, and I would not insult my grandmother by saying anyone makes a better cured fat than she did, but I will say that what I had in front of me in Colonnata was the smoothest and most quietly devastating cured pork I had ever put in my mouth, and that whatever the marble does to fat, it works.

I sat with that plate for a long time. I drank a glass of the local red, which was red without being polished, the way a coffee at a workers’ bar is coffee without being polished. The woman at the next table finished and left. Two men came in and sat at the counter and did not order anything, just stood there talking to the man with the slicer in a dialect I couldn’t follow, and at one point they all laughed, and it was the laugh of three men who had grown up on the same hill. I paid in cash. The man asked me where I was from. I said Hungary, lived in Marina di Pietrasanta. He said anche da noi si mangia bene, also at our place one eats well, which was the closest thing to advertising I had heard him do in the half hour I had been there, and which was also true.

Driving down from Colonnata, you pass the quarries again, and the air does something to the windshield, a fine dust that the wipers do not entirely remove and that the locals call marmettola. It collects on cars. It collects in the rivers. The Frigido and the Carrione, the two streams that come out of these mountains, run white in certain weeks, and the work that is being done up here to extract the marble is not the slow, honorable work of Michelangelo’s day. Most of what comes off these mountains now is not statue-grade stone; it is calcium carbonate destined for toothpaste, cosmetics, and industrial paint, and the cavatori who die at work, and a handful of them die every year, are not dying in the service of art. The man at the bar of the next paese down would tell you this if you asked, in language that would not be diplomatic. The mountain is being eaten, and the people doing the eating are not the people doing the cutting.

By the time I came down into Carrara itself, the road had flattened, and the air had thinned of dust, and I parked near Piazza Gramsci, named for the founder of the Italian Communist Party, who is buried in Rome but whose name presides over the central square here without irony. There is no Piazza Gramsci in Forte dei Marmi, ten kilometers down the coast, where the same mountain delivers the marble used in the bathrooms of the villas where the Milanese spend August. Forte dei Marmi has Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and a beach club where an umbrella for the day costs more than the lardo pasta I had just eaten, and Carrara has Piazza Gramsci. I sat down at a bar on the square and asked for an espresso, and what came was the strongest coffee I had drunk in months, almost black-purple, the kind of coffee a man drinks at five in the morning before going up the hill in a truck. The bar was simple. The chairs were plastic. The clientele at four in the afternoon was three older men in work clothes who had clearly been at the same table for a while and who were arguing without rancor about something I could not catch. Nobody looked at me twice. There is a particular relief in this, in being a foreigner in a place that is too busy with its own life to perform for you.

I have now lived for several years on this coast, and I have come to feel a particular affection for Carrara that I do not feel for the more decorated towns nearby. It is not the affection of solidarity, because I am not a quarryman and I do not come from quarrymen. My people were farmers and lower-middle-class intellectuals on the Hungarian plain, and I will not pretend to a heritage I do not have. It is something more like respect for a place that has not bothered to translate itself for me. The men in Carrara are direct. They say what they think. They sell you what you ordered and not what they have in the back. The food is honest in the way an old tool is honest, no decoration, the handle worn to the shape of the hand that has used it. After three years among the polish of Versilia, the bar in Carrara felt like a window left open in a hot room.

The drive home took me along the coast road through Marina di Massa, the seaside that belongs to Massa, the city next door to Carrara, and where the cavatori go. Marina di Massa does not look like Forte dei Marmi. It looks like the Hungarian holiday camps of my childhood at Lake Balaton, and I mean that as a compliment, because what it is is a working family’s summer: large unfussy hotels, big campsites under the umbrella pines, ex-corporate colonie where the children of FIAT employees in Turin were sent for two weeks of sea air in August all the way through the 1980s, some of which still operate. The pontile in the middle of town juts out over the water, and on the day I drove past it was full of fishermen at four in the afternoon, the way it always is, and they had set up the long counterweighted nets that the men of this coast call bilance and were waiting for whatever the tide would bring. The shipyard at Marina di Carrara, just up the road, is one of the largest in Italy, and on the same drive, two superyachts were sitting in the dry dock waiting to be finished and delivered to people who will never set foot in a colonia in their lives. The same coastline. The same five kilometers.

I crossed back into Versilia just before sunset, and the light was coming low and pink across the Apuans, the way it does on clear evenings, and the white scars on the mountain caught it and held it, and from the angle of the coast road, they looked, for a moment, almost beautiful. I do not know whether they are beautiful. I know that the men who cut them have not been asked. I know that the fat I had eaten earlier in the day had been cured by people who live in the white snow that is not snow, and that the pasta had cost me maybe 12 euros, and that the espresso in Carrara had cost me one euro, and that the woman in the bar had handed me my change without smiling, the way you hand change to a regular, and that this had been one of the kindest gestures I had received in a long time.

There was still some of the day left when I got home. I went out to the kitchen, and I cut a piece of bread, and I poured a glass of the same red I had drunk in Colonnata, which I had bought a bottle of on the way out, and I sat on the terrace and watched the light go off the mountain. The fat had done what fat is supposed to do. It had held the day inside it.