Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  But Tuscany’s wild west is not all about food. Art, old and new, and the people who make it are a big part, particularly in the area around where Michelangelo selected his marble.

  TWO

  Art and the City

  Man had discovered marble—or rather, the marble had found him. Cold stone had become a living presence, a subterranean angel leading humankind out of darkness.

  —Eric Scigliano, Michelangelo’s Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara (2005)

  ROBERTA GIOVANNINI Onniboni, a sixty-something lifelong Pietrasantese artist, remembers well, and with great joy, when she was in her mid-twenties, and sculptors young and old from all over the world came to her town to make art. One of those artists was Colombian Fernando Botero. Others were Lithuanian Jacques Lipchitz, Pole Igor Mitoraj, and American Jeff Koons, who came there for a few years in the early 1990s with his then-wife, Italian parliamentarian and porn star Ilona Staller. (Ilona went by the film name Cicciolina.) These artists, plus many others, made up a swirling stew that kept bubbling over a flame of creativity and was composed of interesting ingredients. Roberta knew all of them and worked with most as an artigiana, or sculptor’s assistant.

  “It was a remarkable time,” she recalled. Pietrasanta was not well known to the outside, non-artist world. The English upper crust in particular had, in the late nineteenth century and again following World War II, discovered the nearby beach community Forte dei Marmi, and a curious few drifted into Pietrasanta.

  But the town was on the artists’ radars. Mentors in colleges and art schools everywhere advised their students that if they wanted to learn how to be sculptors, they should go to Pietrasanta. Its proximity to Carrara and Massa meant there was plenty of marble of all shapes, colors, and sizes nearby, plus Pietrasanta had its own even nearer quarries, found above Seravezza, just down the road and up into the foothills.

  “Forty years ago,” she explained, “Pietrasanta was a ‘medieval’ country. A few students from Canada and the United States were here, and they were very poor when they came. They were eighteen or twenty years old—just young people interested in art. Then, many more-famous sculptors came”—people like Lipchitz in the 1960s, then Botero in the 1970s—“and things began to change; it got more expensive.

  “At that time there were [few] restaurants, for example. Nothing. No tourists. It was a desert. Now it is like a show.”

  Today, as fourth-generation Pietrasantese sculptor Spartaco Palla had told me earlier, there are only two or three studios in Pietrasanta proper. When more tourists began to visit, most studios were pushed to relocate because of the dust and the noise of power hammers against stone in a town that now needed more space for shops and restaurants.

  What forced the issue was when heavy machinery—marble saws and power hammers—began to dominate in the mid-twentieth century. The studios either closed or moved to the suburbs. The spaces that once were filled with more than one hundred studios became high-end clothing stores, art galleries, and eating establishments.

  * * *

  The artists who “discovered” Pietrasanta in the post–World War II period and those working there today amble along the same streets used by many earlier artists, including the Florentine sculptor Michelangelo. There is not much evidence that he actually made art in this part of Versilia. He was there only as a buyer of marble—primarily in Pietrasanta and Seravezza—for a three- or four-year period in the mid-sixteenth century. His lifelong patrons, the Medici of Florence, under the leadership of the Medici Pope Leo X, controlled these mountains above Seravezza, but not the white-marble quarries above Carrara.

  Michelangelo had spent three years designing the façade for the Medici church, San Lorenzo, in Florence, and the family wanted it to be faced with their marble, not marble from the peaks above Carrara. Michelangelo undertook the task of developing the Medici quarries, but grudgingly. He had always preferred the marmo carrarese and had well-established relationships with the cavatori, or marble workers, there.

  Essentially, he wasted nearly a half decade of his creative life; his design for San Lorenzo’s façade never was used, and today the church still exhibits the unfinished, rough-brick exterior of the eleventh-century Romanesque structure. He made little, if any, art during his years in Pietrasanta-Seravezza. It is clear, in Eric Scigliano’s well-documented book Michelangelo’s Mountain, that despite what many people in those two towns would like to believe, the great artist never used local marble for any of his creations, using only marmo carrarese.

  There are two buildings in the heart of Pietrasanta with plaques indicating that Michelangelo signed marble contracts there in the spring of 1518. Locals would like to think he did more for their town, however. This wish gave rise to a legend maintained by generations of Pietrasantesi that the great artist designed the unique stairway inside the 120-foot-high bell tower that sits alongside Pietrasanta’s Duomo di San Martino.

  Originally, the tower’s exterior was faced in white stone. Today, only the rough brick surface remains. The stairs, whether designed by the great artist or not, are what make this structure interesting. Winding upward like a tight corkscrew against the interior walls of this rectangular tower, these stairs are now closed to the public and can be observed while standing on the rectangular ground floor. In a way, it is reminiscent of the concept of the Giuseppe Momo double-helix staircase that leads to the exit of the Vatican Museum in Rome.

  In Pietrasanta’s bell tower, however, the steps are narrow, and there are no handrails. It indeed must have been a gut-tingling climb for anyone forced to creep along the wall’s edge. One slip, and the visitor would plummet to the stone floor below.

  * * *

  Michelangelo’s time here did leave physical evidence of his presence in these mountains more than five hundred years ago. On a bright Saturday in June, a friend and I drove the few miles from Pietrasanta to Seravezza in search of that presence. He likely spent a lot of time in Seravezza, which is higher up and offers a clear shot to the Medici quarries—perhaps more time than he spent in Pietrasanta.

  Seravezza, with its charming folklore and marble industry museum in the Medici palace alongside the Serra River, is as inviting as Pietrasanta, just three miles away. But it has a decidedly different feel to it. While Seravezza is a narrow, stone-quarry town, as rough-hewn as the tall mountains that close in around it, Pietrasanta is an artist community with softer, gentler hues that blend in with the rolling coastal hills it sits against. The Serra and Vezza rivers merge here and become the Versilia River, which cuts through the town’s center and ultimately flows to the sea, three or four miles to the southwest.

  In his unhappy quest to develop marble quarries for the Medici family, Michelangelo would have ridden mules or horses from Seravezza up the valley toward the summit of Monte Altissimo and the village of Azzano. He would have passed tiny villages such as Giustagnana and Fabbiano on his way to inspect the site of a marble quarry high on the mountain overlooking Azzano, which sits in the midst of a sloping hardwood forest. Today, where the road curves, a sign points to a dirt track leading to the bottom of Michelangelo’s quarry. The main road loops back toward Seravezza, giving the traveler a route through a forest valley with small stone villages dotting the upper flanks. These hamlets, strung above the narrow roadway, like colored bits of stone on a giant’s necklace, are where many cavatori live.

  It was along this valley that Michelangelo had to direct workers to build bridges over streams and the Serra River, and lay out a stone road that ran straight up the valley toward the face of Monte Altissimo.

  Remnants still exist of that original steep road ordered by Michelangelo. One section runs just outside of Azzano alongside a thousand-year-old Romanesque parish church, the Pieve della Cappella. Locals have their own legend involving the artist. They credit him with the design of the church portico, now just tumbled remains, along with a circular stained-glass window high above the sanctuary door. Like the belief of folks
in Pietrasanta that Michelangelo designed the bell tower stairs, this claim has no proof to support it.

  Just below the church, on the edge of a wide gully, that steep section of medieval stone road sits across from an abandoned quarry still littered with chiseled blocks of stone, most likely broken out of the mountain a few centuries ago. This is not Michelangelo’s quarry. His was farther along, even higher than Azzano.

  The presence of the great Florentine master and the spark of industry his presence promised created exciting times for locals. Previously, much of the marble from the Serra River Valley was merely collected from the riverbed. Roads and bridges allowed for more large-scale marble extraction. Today, small pieces of white and gray marble, remains of what has been lopped off in modern industrial operations or bits that wash down in the torrential rains that often sweep through Versilia, can still be found in the river all the way to the coast.

  From Azzano, Michelangelo’s mountain—the quarry he attempted to open for the Medici—looms high up to the northeast. Its exposed flanks do not blaze white like those above Carrara, but dark streaks along the high faces of the mountain’s steep marble slabs and lack of fresh cuts show it has been a long time since that particular quarry was worked.

  A local writer, Peter Rosenzweig, said it ceased operations in the 1970s, yielding to unbeatable competition from quarries at Carrara. Not much has come out of the quarry over the centuries; it appears to have been closed longer than it was open. Rosenzweig said there was a flurry of activity in the eighteenth century, when a vein of hardy white marble was exposed, but these episodes appear to have been brief and infrequent.

  I cannot help but wonder what Michelangelo would have created if he had not spent those years trying to open that quarry above Azzano. Another magnificent ceiling, perhaps? More sculptures for the tomb of Pope Julius II? The marble his quarrymen sliced out of Monte Altissimo was “scattered like a trail of crumbs,” Eric Scigliano tells us. One marble column carved out of Monte Altissimo apparently did make it to Florence and was deposited in front of San Lorenzo. It sat there until the seventeenth century, said Scigliano, “when it was buried in a ditch along with other detritus from the unfinished façade.”

  So much for Michelangelo’s mountain and his inability to say no to the Medici and to Pope Leo X. Leo died in 1522, four years after Michelangelo signed contracts in Pietrasanta. Interest in creating the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence diminished. Thankfully, Michelangelo would have another forty-two years to carve statues, paint such marvels as The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and, among several other projects, design the new St. Peter’s in Rome.

  * * *

  Michelangelo may have preferred Carrara marble but he didn’t discover it. Artisans, builders, and emperors alike have been drawn to the whiteness and durability of this stone through history, and quarrying it dates back to the prehistory of this popular region. The Etruscans first started slicing stone from the area around the more accessible base of the western slope of Monte Pisanino, located just above what became the towns of Carrara-Massa and to the north of Monte Altissimo. They used the stone sparingly, for such things as decorations and tombstones, likely because it was so difficult to move larger pieces. (It would be the Romans who would develop transport technology and use it to harvest stone higher up on the mountain.)

  Carrara marble is not soft like the tufa formations these mysterious early Etruscans used for more important larger structures, such as their tombs, and for construction of villages throughout Tuscany and beyond. Once off the mountain, the marble had to be moved by boat to where it was needed. The Etruscans, and the Romans who succeeded them, based a deep-water port at the ancient mouth of the Magra River. Luni acted as the debarkation point for marble harvested in the area and eventually became a major Roman city. In later centuries, as a large population center, Luni would be the seat of Catholic bishops. But nature always has its way. Silt gradually deposited by the river dramatically expanded the coastline westward and turned the area around the crumbling city into a mosquito-laden marshland. The bishops moved their church farther up the Magra River to Sarzana, and the population followed. Luni, by the time Michelangelo arrived in Versilia three or four centuries later, had devolved into ruin.

  There are walkways through the archaeologically revealed stones of Luni, which is now located just over the Tuscany boundary and in the modern region of Liguria. The paths lead to what must have once been the water’s edge, a good mile or so inland from the Magra’s present mouth. Over the centuries this coastline filled in bit by bit, generation by generation, much like the Mediterranean mouth of the Arno River moved, over the centuries, from near Pisa’s historic center to a point perhaps six miles away today.

  The Romans first started quarrying marble on a promontory across the Magra River, and while it was a beautiful white color, Scigliano tells us that its composition was inferior to the marble above Carrara. The Romans moved their quarrying operations a few miles to the east, into the Apuan basin. The earliest references place activity there in the first century BC.

  In Rome, the massive Pyramid of Cestius, dated between 18 and 12 BC, apparently was constructed of Carrara marble. This was also about the time that Emperor Augustus started covering Rome’s brick and local-stone buildings with marble slabs, giving us the image we carry in our heads today of that ancient city. Sometimes marble from eastern Greece was used in Rome, but stone from the closer Carrara was likely used more often.

  Augustus merely clothed his city in veneer, or relatively thin sheets of marble. But the Greeks, Scigliano writes, had built their glorious cities with blocks of marble. The Romans only mimicked “the grandeur the Greeks achieved with solid marble.”

  Some pure-white stone comes from places like Georgia and Colorado in the United States. Even marble from the Greek island of Naxos is whiter than the stone found at Carrara. The difference, and the key to what makes Carrara stone so sought-after, is its hardness. Marble from Carrara is made up of fine, hard-to-see crystals. Some of the whiter stone found elsewhere is too soft, or it is coarser but with easily visible crystals, or it is too brittle, or it “lacks the translucence that makes Carrara’s seem alive,” said Scigliano.

  * * *

  The journey to Azzano and Michelangelo’s mountain was a spur-of-the-moment drive recommended by a friend when we talked one afternoon about Scigliano’s book. It was among the first of many such journeys from my comfortable base in Pietrasanta. People I met would tell me about places I’d never heard about and I would decide to see them for myself. Or, I would just rent a car and go, following narrow roads or walking along a stretch of the pilgrims’ route, the Via Francigena. Travelers with time on their hands—shouldn’t all worthwhile travel be this easygoing?—would be well advised to set up a base in or around a place like Pietrasanta. Then take the narrow roads along the flanks of the Apuan range and visit village after village. Go to Azzano, have a coffee or a delightful meal in a small, family-run trattoria, and then head up the road to the gravel cutoff that leads to the walking trail to the base of Michelangelo’s mountain.

  Then, the adventurous travelers could head back down the road to the coastal highway, turn above the highway, and drive through Carrara.

  Various valleys fan out from this prominent town, making Carrara the apex for all the marble that flows downhill; the slopes of these various valleys are spotted with villages sitting near the giant white slabs of stone still waiting to be harvested. Choose any of those valleys and these tiny villages open up, each with their own unique feeling or aura.

  One, the highest village above Carrara, is called Colonnata. It spills across a lower slope at the base of a series of imposing mountains with their faces sheared off to expose the marble for which the area around Carrara is famous. Standing on a walkway along the front of old stone houses and staring off toward quarries to the north and south, these stone walls seem almost close enough to touch.

  If tourists visit here, it would be ironic, bec
ause there is no mention of the town in most Tuscany guidebooks in English. Scigliano posits that the village’s name suggests that it might have started out as a colonia of Rome, an outpost with housing for slaves who were forced to work in the Roman quarries.

  Marble produced from the Colonnata basin includes the “gray bardiglio and black nero di Colonnata.” Clearly, the variety of marble found in the quarries that are carved out of these mountains shows that the Carrara area produces more than just stunning white, translucent stone.

  * * *

  The people of Massa-Carrara Province have reputations for being strongly individualistic and politically left-leaning. The rigor of the work in quarries, I suspect, has helped create this individualism. Friends in Pietrasanta describe the people working in the mountains within and above those two towns as “rough and direct” in their speech. Among one another, they speak in dialect nearly undecipherable to outside Italians. They voice short, clipped-off words and phrases that writer Eric Scigliano described as sounding like “chisels tapping against stones.”

  The far left is not out of reach for many of these people today. It was in Carrara where, immediately after the end of the war in 1945, the Italian Anarchist Federation was founded. Roots of the movement go as far back in Italian history as 1869, on the eve of Italian Unification that was completed the following year.

  Colonnata, for example, is home for many villagers with those tendencies. Mounted on a wall next to a small parking area, there is a modern plaque that states quite succinctly, Ai compagni anarchio uccisi sulla strada della liberta (To fellow anarchists killed on the road to freedom).

  This plaque likely refers to late-August 1944 reprisals carried out by German SS troops and Italian black-shirt Fascists just days after the August 12 massacre at Sant’Anna several miles to the southwest. Mussolini’s right-wing Fascists still loyal to their leader killed hundreds of Carraresi and people from villages around Carrara, including Colonnata, either as part of German reprisals or long after Italy’s September 1943 surrender to the Allies. Colonnata was burned.