Written by Joey George
A two-lane turnpike-esque highway transitions to single lane windy roads, akin to the swirls of the paintbrush found in a da Vinci painting. The Florentine noise is gone, replaced by the echoes of the wilderness, a Roman frontier.
Shades of spring green juxtapose the white mountains, mid-May rain adding touches of grit to the vista. Fog mixes with the smoke of cigarettes, haze on the horizon. Like Renaissance statues the mountains are sculpted, a mix of man-made and natural erosion, a striking sight.
I am immediately impressed with the operation, Mercedes trucks hauling up the steep roads, the ebb and flow of Monday morning economics, powered by German and Italian engineering. The familiar scent of wet rain carries through the air, a marble-scented candle. Vector qualities were the most surprising-the magnitude and direction of the Carrara marble mine. I expected smaller scales-fewer quarries, more gradual gradients. Our enthusiastic museum guide boasted about the mine’s advancements, mainly extraction efficiency and safety improvements. The cold air and jagged mountains were quite refreshing, away from the hustle of Milan and Florence.
As an industrial engineering student, I am grateful to observe the raw material side of the supply chain. The finished product usually gets all the praise, Michelangelo’s David, for instance. However, beauty exists in the natural elements, the beginning chisels, the diamond teeth of state-of-the-art saws, witnessing how humans make an imprint on the environment and vice versa.
The journey was already a haul with modern technology, internal combustion engines, the military design of the Land Rovers, the flow of electricity like the water currents streaming down the slopes. Imagining Roman efforts, the process of extracting and transporting marble to Rome, is difficult to fathom.
Human touches provided warmth from the coldness of the silky stone and howling wind, the tough lives of children working stars to stars, the museum founder Signore Danesi’s humble home. I am reminded of Pittsburgh’s history, marble replaced by steel, a little less elegant, but two tales intertwining.
Swanson School of Engineering 