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Located in the northernmost tip of Italy’s Tuscany region, the marble of Carrara has been prized for thousands of years, primarily for use in sculptures and building décor… The marble takes its name from the town of Carrara, nicely situated between the beaches and the tremendous white mountains above.
Although there are hundreds of quarries squeezed together on these grand, white mountains, only a few yield marble of the highest quality. The finest marble – pure white and with a flawless texture – is “hidden” deeply within the mountains (hence the underground workings).
The most recent production data I could locate for the mines and quarries indicated that 1,200,000 tons of marble was exported out of Carrara last year. The top 3 importers of the marble? China, the United States and Germany.
If you want to see something cool, cut and paste these GPS coordinates – 44.095145, 10.139011 – into the satellite view of Google Earth or Google Maps or whatever to see just how vast these marble mountains are and to see how they look just like now from high above.
As an interesting “oh by the way” for those of you that have seen the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace… The second half of the opening chase scene was filmed in the mines and quarries you see in this video. The first half of the chase sequence was filmed in the tunnels of the SS45 along Lake Garda, which is nowhere near Carrara, but whatever.
For any viewers wishing to visit the marble quarries of Carrara, it is possible to arrange limited tours (no underground access or, trust me, I would have paid up for that). There is also a small museum – the Cava Museo Fantiscritti – at the base of the vast white expanse that details just how grim life was for those that worked to extract the marble in the past – think frequent loss of life, frequent amputations, children (yes, thousands of children worked here in the past as well) having to urinate on their bare feet to prevent from freezing in the winter, etc. and you’ll have the right idea. Of course, the museum also has tools, equipment and a recreation of one of the typical homes of a miner (again, quite grim). If you look online by typing “Marble of Carrara” in, a good amount of information should come up.
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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality (if it is not done automatically).
You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here:
As well as a small gear update here:
You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here:
Thanks for watching!
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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.
These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand – bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind… These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.
So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!
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