The beauty and the horror of the Carrara marble quarries in the Alpi Apuane. This is where the white marble in Florence has always come from, both for architecture and sculpture. These mountains have been gnawed at, split, sliced with cables, sheared explosively and violently shaped since ancient times. The high villages are dusted white, everything but everything is shrouded in marble dust, all colour sucked white except the small fast rivers and few lakes. These are intense, alarming, greens and blues, the river and lake beds marble dust mirrors reflecting and amplifying light and colour. The awesome scale of these now cuboid blinding white mountains is stupefying. The white detonating and growing in expanse as the mountains diminish in volume. 'Michelangelo lived for a while among the quarries of Seravezza and thought up a grandiose scheme to carve the peak of "Crestola" into a huge face and a lighthouse."
Romano Cagnoni photographed these quarrymen over five years. The scale, danger and architecture of these mountains is humbling. It is worth looking at Romano Cagnoni's photographs particularly the sections named Darkness and Ideagrams.
Pacini Editore. 1987
