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 li…