FAMOUS ITALIAN MARBLE

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2663, 7 January 1916, Page 3

FAMOUS ITALIAN MARBLE

In the country of the Carrara there are no means of forgetting that one is in tho region of marble. Everywhere it asserts it-self. In the village square uudei- the plane trees (says a correspondent) wo sit with our: coffee at a marble table. The sun is baking the marble dust of the roadways—those broad, glimmering tracks where creamy oxen steadily drag their heavy carts of 6awn • marble, swaying their yoked heads 'rhythmically and rousing the dust with their yellow hoofs. A fine, light substance this dust. Easily blown and,scattered, it neutralises every object in the vicinity. It silvers the plane treos, greys tho arid grasses, and powders over the burned red tiles of the houses. The old obsolete fort, broken and dismantled, stares blindly near at hand. Its plaster surface has peeled away here and there and exhibits an antique brick foundation strengthened with large chunks of time-corroded marble. There are newer and stronger forts on tho hill .slopes not far away, for we are quite near one of Italy's naval bases. Hot, glowing and intense violet, the sky covers all. The sceno is a harmony of amethyst, opal, and ivory. In tile sun-spattered shade we sit and smoke, lazily watching the carts go, with groaning axles, to the shore to unload at the worm-eaten wooden jetty, whence all the marble is shipped and has been shipped for hundreds of years. • Carrara marble! The familiar words, which once on a time indicated something rare and costly, have here a lesser significance. We cannot help thinking of tho thousands of cities all over tho earth with public places and museums and palaces where tho marble is put to use; of the multitude of architects and sculptors who, prizing the material for its suggestion of transparence_ and for its soft submission to the chisel, havo fashioned it into innumerable forms of beauty; who have paid great sums of money -for it, and probably never realised that the transportation by cart and ship accounted for the major portion of t'he 'hoavy price paid. Here at Forte dei Marmi it is as common as clay is in England—children trundle pieces of it in their games, and only the trouble of shaping it prevents the peasants from building their hovels with it. The .mines, nigh in the hills, are inexhaustible —huge pearly-palo caverns of the luminous substance echo continually with the clink and clank of the miners' tools. The whirr of the drill is like the sound of the sea on pebbles where the open quarries sprawl with gaping throats with snowy, magnificent boulders. Shining lumps butt out of the precipitous green hillsides, and broken marble fragments are used to pave the roads and paths which wind over solid ground of the same lovely, material. Marble forms the beds of the cataracts, and, the rounded pebbles in the steep streams look like cascades of alabaster eggs. The long,, sinuous roads from the hills to the sea aro grooved deeply with the transit of numberless carte. They have been thudded by countless generations of patient oxen. But though these immemorial marble caravans go grinding' daily down to the old wooden pier the beautiful mountain range seems spoiled not at all by centuries of quarrying, blasting,, and mining. When wandering among those mines and quarries the upheaval caused by man seems gigantic ' and awful, yet, while there, one has no feeling of the earth being wounded or ill-treated. It has. been forced to bring its hidden treasures to the light, and, no matter in what manner the marble he broken out of its secret prison or- loosened from its hold on the surface, its own loveliness justifies its condition in displacement. But here as we sit, some few hours journey away, under the trees we look across leagues of air at the dignified chain of mountains. No fault, no scar appears. The gaps and chasms, the great quarries, the splintered gorges and 1 enormous gullies at this distance dwindle to mere silver threads. Torrents of broken marble fallen down the misty blue forested slopes, seem to us as snow drifted in hollows and cracks among the peaks of the great Carrara Tango. 'Jlioy are a delight to the eyo and satisfying to tho physical sense on a fervid summer day, suggesting, as they dto, fresh winds and fine cold air on remote heights where in reality no coolness ia.