The places

The extraction of marble, the essence of the rich and proud traditions of this tiny part of Tuscany, has redesigned the silhouette of our landscape with fractures, cracks and passages for the transport of the noble pieces of stone into the valley below: a complex process that required meticulous planning and organisation, methods that have been perfected over centuries by the craftsmen, handed down from generation to generation, through the knowledge and wisdom of tradition.

Sculpting marble is the undressing of nature, where the shape does not derive from the material itself, but exists before, and is revealed thanks to the expert understanding that brings life to our imagination by slowly removing layer upon layer of superfluous marble. Michelangelo, the great artist and sculptor who often visited this area to obtain the material of his dreams, wrote:

The greatest artist does not have any concept Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain Within its excess, though only A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it

A venerable tale, with its beginning in the marbled splendour of Ancient Rome through to the Classicism and the Renaissance, a tradition that lives on today, in modern and contemporary artists such as Henry Moore, Miró, Arp, Botero, Mitoraj, all of whom have thought, created and modelled their works of art in the artistic marble laboratories dotted around and so typical of this narrow stretch of land between the mountains and the sea.