Swanson School of Engineering

by Caiden Martos, Mechanical Engineering, Summer 2026, Florence

Visiting the Carrara mines today, I was surprised just how much “stuff” there is for us to constantly be harvesting and using throughout the last several centuries. Although we didn’t get to see as much of the mines as originally planned, I still feel as though I got a pretty good sense of the massive scale of the operation. I’ve always had a pretty bad fear of heights, so immediately when our bus was climbing those steep and narrow roads to get to the top of the mountains, I was definitely hit with the sense of the height that we were climbing. I just didn’t actually expect it to be so high up, and our guide even mentioned how the marble goes from the height we were at all the way to the base of the mountain. It was just simply just a large amount of materials that I struggle to even comprehend the scale of, and there were many more quarries that I never even saw. The fact that we were up on those mountains centuries ago during the Renissance running generally the same operation to build many of the ancient cities is astounding given the difference in technologies. Even today I find the operation unbelievable, and just can’t imagine how that system worked with any amount of efficiency back then.