Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara

Introduction: Aristide's Trail
Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
He was as much shaped by the marble as the marble was shaped by him.
William Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo
"In Italy," my grandmother used to say, "our people wore hats." Not the shapeless caps of ordinary laborers: the men of the Mazzei family wore the crowned fedoras appropriate to landowners and lawyers, government officials and...stone carvers. They worked with their hands, but in a trade that, in their home town, was as proud as a medieval guild: they worked the marble. Her grandfather Vincenzo had been a cavatore in the marble mecca of Carrara, one of the quarrymen who hacked and pried the great blocks of stone loose from the mountain and eased them down the slopes. Perhaps they had arrived in the marble belt just a few decades or generations back; Mazzei is typically a toscano, not carrarino, name, and my grandmother claimed (without any particular evidence) that we were related to one eminent Tuscan, Philip Mazzei. This peripatetic physician, merchant, and adventurer became a friend and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson, served as revolutionary Virginia's roving ambassador to Europe, and joined in both the French Revolution and the Polish government. His boosters call him, with unintended irony, "the godfather of the Declaration of Independence" because of his writings, which Jefferson translated and purportedly borrowed from. He did help draft a Polish constitution.
Alleged ancestors aside, the familiar Tuscany of Chianti wine, rolling hills, and pricey, picturesque villas is a far cry from the rough peaks and rough-hewn ways of Carrara. Though the town and surrounding territory were nominally annexed to Tuscany when Italy was unified in the 1860s, they remain a world apart -- as Michelangelo Buonarroti discovered more than five hundred years ago, when he came seeking marble for Rome's and Florence's grandest monuments.
The pay was meager in the mid-1800s and the quarry work was punishing. It began soon after midnight, when the cavatori started the long hike up the slopes to launch that morning's assault upon the stone before the heat of day set in. Death came suddenly and frequently, when shaky outcrops collapsed or ropes broke and twenty-ton blocks went careering off their skids. Nevertheless, Vincenzo Mazzei survived. He became capocava -- foreman -- of one of the largest quarries, and his son Adolfo could have followed in his booted tracks. But Adolfo had other ideas. Though they did not study at Carrara's Accademia di Belle Arti, he and his brothers graduated to another stage in the gritty alchemy that turns rough rock into polished sculpture. Adolfo went to work at Laboratorio Lazzerini, Carrara's largest sculpture studio, rising to foreman when he was just twenty-three. Then he and his brothers set up their own laboratorio, where they chipped and scribed and shaped and buffed the stone, producing busts of Italy's aristocrats, nymphs, and fauns for its fountains, saints and Madonnas for its churches.
Adolfo became one of Carrara's most distinguished sculptors. In 1909 he won a first-place gold medal at Rome's Grand Exposition of Art, Industry, and Commerce for his bust of the locally born, nationally revered poet Giosue Carducci; the photograph of the bust accompanying an article in L'Illustrazione di Roma reveals both hyperrealistic detail and the intense Romantic expression expected in portraits of poets. At that point Adolfo had already completed his most lucrative commission, four statues for Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York, and used his earnings to buy and refurbish a spacious, stately house just up from Carrara's center, on a road to the marble quarries. To express his gratitude to America and his delight at what he saw in New York, he vowed to name his next son after its president, Theodore Roosevelt. When his wife, who was already pregnant, bore a daughter, he named her Roosevelt. But such a name was unseemly after the Fascists came to power, so "Roosevelt" was Italianized to "Rosvelda." She married a Tuscan immigrant from San Miniato, who founded a business inventing and manufacturing glues, blades, and abrasives for those who worked the stone. Their son Luigi Brotini took it over, and invented more. More than half a century later, Luigi introduced me to the lore of Carrara and the majesty of the marble mountain.