The luxury stone is being mined at the expense of the region and its people.

JULY 22, 2025

Italians call quarried marble and other natural stones pietra viva — literally, “living stone.” Marble was, at one point, alive: The metamorphic rock is forged from the calcite shells of innumerable sea creatures. In billion-year-old seabeds, the remains of these creatures piled up and compacted, first becoming limestone and then, thanks to intense heat and pressure, marble. Hundreds of millions of years later, as land masses shifted and crashed together, forming mountain ranges, the marble was thrust upward from the bottom of the sea.

This is what happened in the Apuan Alps, home to one of the most significant marble deposits on earth. The stone from this area, known widely as Carrara marble, is particularly pure, with a density and strength that makes it ideal for large-scale ornamental purposes. Quarried since the first century BC, it became famous throughout the world after Michelangelo used it for works including David and the Pietà. Today, coveted for its snow-white color, veined with delicate gray, the marble is being mined at an astonishing rate. In the last 30 years, it is estimated that more marble has been removed from the mountains than during the previous two millennia. Current annual extraction rates are about 4 million tons. In the early 20th century, it was less than 300,000 tons a year.

The majority of the stone, which can cost more than $10,000 for a countertop-sized slab, winds up thousands of miles away, in the United States and new centers of wealth in the Gulf, India and China. According to those who have worked in the local quarries for decades, the finest white variety has been entirely depleted; the rest of the quarries could be emptied within 50 years.

The city of Carrara is both synonymous with and built from the stone: Marble carpets the sidewalks and piazzas, lines the windows and decorates shopfronts and buildings. Even the public benches are marble.

Meanwhile, the profits of the billion-dollar industry — largely controlled by multinationals and private investors (including the Bin Laden family, which owns 50 percent of Marmi Carrara, one of area’s largest firms) — largely bypass the region itself. The city of Carrara, wedged at the foot of quarries, is mired in debt and poverty. The industry has taken a toll on the area’s biodiversity and water quality.

Now, locals whose ancestors once toiled proudly in the quarries have established a movement to shutter them. I went to Carrara to understand how marble, once the pride and lifeblood of the region, and a symbol of old-world splendor, has come to be seen as a curse.

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The city of Carrara is both synonymous with and built from the stone: Marble carpets the sidewalks and piazzas, lines the windows and decorates shopfronts and buildings. Even the public benches are marble. One local piazza contains marble statues of a giant wine bottle opener, a bulbous stick-figure robot, a Cadillac that looks 3D printed. A multitude of local shops sell miniature versions of these marble creations, aimed at tourists who are nowhere to be seen.

When I visited on an unbearably hot day in August, the city was empty, with shops boarded up and restaurants shuttered. “Carrara” has long been a byword around the world for wealth and luxury — you can buy Carrara watches and Carrara wines; visit Carrara Wellness, a “luxury rehab and addiction treatment center” in Malibu, and eat Carrara Wagyu from an Australian beef outfit — but the Massa-Carrara region is among the poorest in Tuscany. The area has a declining population, a higher-than-average percentage of people living below the poverty line, and stark inequality. The municipality of Carrara is known to have high rates of public debt, despite the billion-dollar industry on its doorstep.

In a marble-rimmed parking lot, I met Eros Tetti, an environmental activist and the founder of Salviamo le Apuane — Save the Apuan Alps — a nearly 12,000 member-strong group devoted to protecting the biodiversity and cultural heritage of the mountains. Through protests, petitions and political campaigning, the group advocates closing the quarries in favor of more sustainable economies, and has brought widespread attention to the environmental impact of marble mining. Tetti grew up in the Apuan Alps, in a rugged region over the hills from Carrara called the Garfagnana, and his grandfather was a farmer; he would like to see the area regenerate through ecotourism, artisanal food production, and agriculture that draw on the traditions of his ancestors.

Over macchiatos, Tetti walked me through his reasons for turning against marble. Economically, he argues, marble today brings little benefit to the local population. At its height in the 20th century, he told me, some 15,000 locals worked in the quarries; today, it’s fewer than a thousand. Technological innovation means marble is mined faster and more intensively with fewer workers. The marble used to be cut, polished, sculpted, or otherwise prepared for sale in the area itself, bolstering local employment; now, many raw blocks are shipped to China and elsewhere for processing, where labor is cheaper.

Earlier this year, a worker was killed by a crane and falling block in the quarries; another while transporting marble. There are numerous other recent examples of injuries and deaths caused by falling slabs and rockfalls.

Tax-evading strategies employed by marble companies — like misreporting how much marble is being quarried and shipped out, or falsifying the quality of the stone to minimize tariffs — means that the city doubly loses out. These issues have been the subject of investigations for decades; for example, a 2020 review of 63 marble companies by the Carrara authorities found that the market values of extracted materials were approximately 25 percent higher than what companies reported on their data sheets. Many marble companies continue to operate according to an archaic rule from 1751, which grants local families the right to exploit the quarries without paying taxes. As Tetti spoke, he occasionally lowered his voice to a whisper. On several occasions, he said, he has received death threats, and other forms of intimidation, for his campaigning work.

The historic pull of the industry remains strong, he acknowledged: It is part of family stories and collective mythologies. Everyone knows someone who worked in the mines. Carrara’s cathedral — made almost entirely of Carrara marble, naturally — features a nativity with miniature renderings of mining life: figurines of cavatori (quarrymen) with chisels and axes, little marble wheelbarrows, blocks being lugged down the hill. During the first COVID lockdown, when fear of the virus was strong, a group of marble companies paid for a helicopter to fly the local priest and a marble statue of the Madonna over the town, to bless its inhabitants.

For every perfect block, there’s a huge amount of stone debris and waste that gets crushed into powder: calcium carbonate. This powder is then sold as an industrial material that gets added to a vast array of everyday goods, from bricks and paint to toothpaste and pasta (calcium carbonate effectively acts as a filler — a cheap way to improve texture and thickness).

The industry’s darker side — the environmental costs, the dangers of the work itself — tends to be swept under the rug, said Tetti. Earlier this year, a worker was killed by a crane and falling block in the quarries; another while transporting marble. There are numerous other recent examples of injuries and deaths caused by falling slabs and rockfalls. Local authorities estimated that between 2006 and 2015, there were 102 accidents per year, among the approximately 800 people working directly in the quarries. Nine of the accidents during this period were fatal. Workers and others in the area are exposed to airborne particles containing crystalline silica, which result from cutting and chiseling stone, and can lead to fatal diseases like silicosis and lung cancer.

The industry also damages the environment. The Apuan Alps are uniquely biodiverse, home to wolves, golden eagles, a rare Alpine newt, and dozens of species of endemic flora. In addition to the historic Carrara quarries, there are some 60 other mines that sit within the Apuan Alps regional park, a UNESCO-designated biodiversity hotspot. “It’s not a real park, because it has holes – and inside these holes, you have quarries,” Tetti said. “It’s quite crazy. It’s a contradiction.” Marble dust and runoff from the mining process contaminates waterways and damages the land. “When it rains,” he told me, “the rivers become white like milk.”

When we eventually reached a quarry and I got out the car, I felt as if I had walked into an overexposed photograph. The heat and light were obliterating. The quarry looked more like a modern metropolis than a natural landscape: soaring towers, symmetrical grids, improbably clean lines.

Around 75 percent of the marble quarried in the Carrara region isn’t even used to build buildings or make sculptures. For every perfect block, there’s a huge amount of stone debris and waste that gets crushed into powder: calcium carbonate. This powder is then sold as an industrial material that gets added to a vast array of everyday goods, from bricks and paint to toothpaste and pasta (calcium carbonate effectively acts as a filler — a cheap way to improve texture and thickness). The practice began in the 1980s, Tetti said, when the industry had begun to decline; marble bosses realized they could powder and sell off their product with greater ease.

After showing me around the town, Tetti drove us up the mountain, toward the quarries. Soon, the road narrowed and dissolved into pebbly white scree. The trees disappeared; everything turned white, covered in marmettola, the marble dust produced by the mining process. Enormous blocks of stone flanked the roads. We stopped briefly at a small open-air museum filled with replicas of traditional tools; its gift shop sold marble paperweights, magnets, vases, teddy bears and the like.

When we eventually reached a quarry and I got out the car, I felt as if I had walked into an overexposed photograph. The heat and light were obliterating. The quarry looked more like a modern metropolis than a natural landscape: soaring towers, symmetrical grids, improbably clean lines. Heavy machines lurked; giant blocks of freshly quarried stone, stacked like slabs of butter, awaited their ride down the mountain. Small broken bits of marble were everywhere.

We left before our eyes could fully adjust to the brightness. On our way back down, Tetti pointed out a machine the size of a city block, used to grind the quarried marble into calcium carbonate dust. A few hairpin turns later, we passed by a streetside workshop that looked semi-abandoned; assorted replicas of Renaissance busts and figures poked out from behind thorny bushes. A replica of Michelangelo’s David lay sprawled on his side, blocking the entrance.

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A few days later, I was back in the passenger seat of a car making its way into the Apuan Alps. The driver was Rosi Fontana, the communications officer of Henraux, one of the area’s best-known marble quarrying companies. Founded by a French entrepreneur in 1820, Henraux is based in Seravezza, some 10 miles from the town of Carrara. Centuries earlier, Michelangelo praised the marble from what are now Henraux’s quarries, describing it as “crystalline, reminiscent of sugar.”

Fontana — a petite, voluble woman with a firmness that put me in mind of a seasoned teacher — emphasized that this marble is not technically Carrara marble, even as it is from “exactly the same mountains.” Only marble from quarries in the immediate vicinity of the town of Carrara is allowed to be designated Carrara (much like champagne or Parma ham must come from a specific area to be described as such). I later learned, however, that Henraux has a design company named “Luce di Carrara” that makes marble furniture and homewares, so they still manage to use the Carrara name to their advantage.

Henraux’s five quarries, which lie inside the boundaries of the Apuan Alps regional park, are among those that Tetti wants to see closed. As we wound our way into the thickly forested peaks, 4,000 feet high, phone signal dropped, as did the temperature; the air was cool and pine fresh. “When you’re up here, you forget everything,” Fontana said. “You feel like you’re on holiday.”

After the quarries, we visited Henraux’s factory. Our first stop was the showroom, a cavernous, sleek former warehouse filled with products from the Luce Di Carrara line (sculptural tables, modular marble bookshelves) as well as miniature models of sculptures by the likes of Henry Moore and Joan Miró. Beyond the showroom was a series of enormous machines that process the marble. Henraux prides itself on being a full-service operation, meaning that it doesn’t just quarry the marble; it processes the raw stone into everything from building facades to high-end bathroom fittings to contemporary artworks. Outside, I saw queues of enormous blocks waiting to be processed. One, stamped with fading red ink, read “Property of 60 Wall Street.”

The environmentalists simply want to fight, Fontana suggested, rather than to work or to contribute to the community. Otherwise why go after the marble industry, one that is actually doing something productive, helping to make things that last forever?

In the next warehouse lay the outcome of the machines: rows and rows of gleaming, polished slabs of marble. Some were just barely threaded with gray, like a spider’s web. Some were veined with spiky black, while others were maelstroms of green and silver, maroon and orange. Nearby, workers were measuring and arranging large white marble tiles that will form the facade of a Mormon church. We wound our way past more slabs and an array of artworks — a classical torso, a horror-movie skeleton, a bust of Eva Perón, a plastic bag made of white stone — before Fontana led me back to Henraux’s marble-decked, air-conditioned lobby. I was handed a stack of glossy printed matter showcasing the company’s recent projects: a grand mosque for the sultan in Abu Dhabi, the facade of ExxonMobil’s headquarters in Houston, private residences in Paris and Manhattan.

Henraux works under strict environmental protocols, Fontana assured me, though she declined to go into specifics. The company, which employs 120 people, excavates marble solely for ornamental purposes like art and architecture, not to be sold off as calcium carbonate; only the scraps, offcuts, and dust — what would otherwise be waste — are repurposed in that way, according to Fontana. She dismissed concerns about the quarries’ environmental impact, saying that all the quarries make up a tiny speck (some 5%) of the vast regional park. (In fact, the park was reduced in size, from 50,000 hectares to 20,000, to accommodate the quarries). The environmentalists simply want to fight, Fontana suggested, rather than to work or to contribute to the community. Otherwise why go after the marble industry, one that is actually doing something productive, helping to make things that last forever? Besides, marble is an essential part of the locals’ culture, she said. Telling them not to work with it would be like telling “the Eskimo people not to fish.”

Geologists I spoke to about the impact of the marble industry disagreed with Fontana’s portrayal. Alessia Nannoni, a geologist at the University of Florence, told me she has found that marmettola, the marble dust, infiltrates aquifers and flows into rivers, particularly during heavy rains (this is one of the wettest parts of Italy). The Apuan Alps are a crucial water source for the region, which in the summer months harbors a population of 2.5 million. But when marmettola runs into the aquifers, it creates a thick slurry and renders the water undrinkable, both because of its turbidity (the water becomes chalky and debris-filled) and because the marble runoff carries heavy metals and oils from the mining process.

Quarry-eroded mountains are geologically less stable, increasing the risk and severity of mudslides and flash floods in the surrounding valleys. Incidents in recent years have caused major displacement and death; a 2014 flood, for instance, left 300 people needing rescue in Carrara. These events are already intensifying because of climate change, and they’re further exacerbated, said Nannoni, by overmining and a weakened geological landscape.

But the industry’s narrative, tinged with nostalgia, is persistent and powerful. “They talk like the mountains can regenerate to infinity,” said Matteo Procuranti, a musician, actor and lifelong Carrara resident who creates satirical theater to protest the quarries. Anna Marson, a former Tuscany regional minister who now teaches urban planning at a university in Venice, was closely involved in putting forward a plan to impose stricter environmental regulations on the region’s marble quarries in 2014. The plan, in large part fueled by local activism, took into account scientific research and the voices of environmentalists like Tetti. It set out to prevent the opening of new quarries and the expansion of preexisting ones, and halt excavation in protected areas, particularly above 1,200 meters. But the influence of the marble lobby, Marson told me, was relentless: “Quarry owners paid for entire daily newspaper pages against me.” During negotiations, the politicians proposing the plan were forced to continually water it down; ultimately, it was never implemented.

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In a vast studio in a restored fish factory, Cynthia Sah and Nicolas Bertoux, from Hong Kong and France respectively, have been making contemporary marble sculptures for more than 25 years. The couple moved to the area to work with its marble, and they primarily sculpt by hand. The studio, not far from Henraux’s showroom, is filled with sleek, abstract, and often monumental works that show in galleries, museums, offices, and sculpture parks.

Quarrying is, by definition, destructive. It alters the landscape irrevocably. When I asked Rodolfo Gentili, a biologist who studies the rare flora and fauna of the Apuan Alps, whether conservation and quarrying could coexist, his answer was a decisive no.

When I visited, Sah and Bertoux spoke with admiration about the marble workers’ pride in their trade; their generations-old traditions, language and songs; their relationship with the land. Sauro Mattei, a retired cavatore the couple has worked with for years, joined us for an aperitivo. A compact, wiry character, Mattei is in his late sixties, but possesses the energy and physique of a teenage boy. He comes from a family of quarry workers and started in the mines when he was 15, helping to clean up blocks, frying polenta for lunch. After a while, because he was small, he started doing work that involved climbing and abseiling the cliffs, helping to ease the marble blocks down the mountain. Blessed with a booming voice, Mattei also became the go-to person for singing songs to keep workers in sync and belting out warnings. (He demonstrated for me the sound he’d make to alert workers below of an imminent explosion: “ALAMINAAAAHOOO!”) He misses the work; it had given him purpose, and a deep connection to the mountains — to the extent that he’s written several books of poetry about marble.

Sah and Bertoux take a diplomatic view of the contest between the marble barons and the environmentalists. They deplore the corruption that defines parts of the industry and acknowledge that more could be done to make the business of marble fair and transparent, and to ensure it benefits locals: worker cooperatives, stricter environmental regulations, fair taxation, and so on. But in Bertoux’s eyes, closing the quarries, as Tetti and his fellow activists demand, is not the solution. He likens the quarries to Machu Picchu: they’re beautiful expressions of human work. “Work makes man human,” he said. “I agree that we have to be careful of what we do, careful of the way we’re working, but we have to work.” In their own practices, Sah and Bertoux said, they try to minimize the environmental impact of quarrying. Many of their sculptures are made from offcuts and pieces that would otherwise be wasted.

Their efforts are laudable, but as artists, they represent a tiny fraction of the today’s marble activities. And quarrying is, by definition, destructive. It alters the landscape irrevocably. When I asked Rodolfo Gentili, a biologist who studies the rare flora and fauna of the Apuan Alps, whether conservation and quarrying could coexist, his answer was a decisive no. But as long as the world’s elite want gleaming sinks and grand columns in mansions and company headquarters — and as long as global industries use chemical fillers for things like concrete and toothpaste — the quarries are unlikely to close. There’s too much money, and too much mythos, at stake.

Still, urging the community to imagine a Carrara without quarries, as activists like Tetti are doing, is an essential prerequisite for change. They’ve learned from the great sculptors that the ideal form only emerges through steadily chipping away.

PHOTO: Carrara, March 2025, by Ville MJ Hyvönen (via Wikimedia)