Carrara Marble Quarries

A recent survey indicated that Americans are generally proud of their country. This is true among all groups including Blacks and Hispanics. Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are the only exception. Apparently only 36% of the people in this age group are glad to live in America. In other words, 64% of college age Americans are not happy with their country.

 

I guess that it has always been the case for the young and inexperienced not to realize how good they have it, especially in this country. Unfortunately, these college age malcontents have had very little real education to help with their limited life experience.

 

Below is a traveler’s account of what laborers of their age experienced in the marble quarries of Italy a little more than a 100 years ago. *

 

In all Carrara and the valley of Torano I saw no beautiful or distinguished faces, --the women were without sweetness, the men a mere gang of workmen. Now, common as this is in any manufacturing city of the North, it is very uncommon in Italy, where humanity has not been injured and enslaved by machinery as it has with us ….

 

I understood this better when, about four o’clock 

on the next morning, I went in the company of a lame youth into the quarries themselves. There are some half-dozen of them, glens of marble that lead you into the heart of the mountains, valleys without shade, full of a brutal coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be felt. Torano, that littler town you come upon, at the very threshold of the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Ages, full of stones and refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all sorts…among which the people live. Thus busy with frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, where no green thing has ever grown, or even a bird build her nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks among the blocks and hills of broken marble…which are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor, patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp boulders and dazzling rocks, …pulling as though to break their hearts under the tyranny of the stones, …Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise like the shrieking of iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture are sawn out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drown any song that of old might have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the quarries that, having dehumanized man, have themselves become obscene…. The quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it is a sense of slavery and death that you feel….an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded only to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some frightful tragedy…. Then, as you return through the sinister town of Torano with its sickening sights and smells, you come into the pandemonium of the workshops, where nothing has a being but the shriek of the rusty saws drenched with water, driven by machinery, cutting the marble into uniform slabs to line urinals or pave a closet. At last, in a sort of despair, overwhelmed with heat and noise, you reach your inn, and though it be midday in July, you seize your small baggage and set out for where the difficult road leads out of this spoiled valley to the olives and the sea.

 

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*This description of the Carrara marble quarries was written by Edward Hutton in 1908 in his book Florence and Northern Tuscany. Although an Englishman, he regarded Italy as his home and wrote a series of books on its various regions and towns.  He loved the Italian people and practically everything about them, but Carrara was a different story. He is my favorite travel author and I have been publishing what I consider to be the “best” of Hutton on my blog, Edward Hutton’s Italy.

 

 Note: Here is an explanation from my scientist brother about the formation of the mountains of marble.

 

 "most of marble is the remains of shellfish such as clams, and oysters. Shellfish make their shells from Calcium Carbonate and when they die their shells under pressure of the water transform into limestone and sometimes dolomite depending on location. Marble forms from limestone by what is called metamorphosis which involves tremendous pressure and heat. This rearranges the molecular structure of limestone into marble. Underwater volcanic activity and other geological forces lead to mountain formation as the molten rock rises from the ocean and cools. Imagine the vast number of clams, oysters, etc. which went into the making of the Carrara Quarry."

Declaration of Independence

  

                                          

 

Many, many years ago when I earned my Ph.D in History from Fordham University, my field of concentration was British politics at the time of the American Revolution. The subject of my dissertation was the political career of General Henry Seymour Conway, a statesman and politician as well as a military man. 

Conway was one of the few British politicians to oppose the attempt to subdue the American colonies by military force. In fact, he was the one who led the fight in the House of Commons to repeal the notorious Stamp Act in 1766 during the short lived Rockingham administration, and then in 1782, it was his motion in Parliament for a cessation of hostilities in America after the surrender of a British army at Yorktown, that effectively brought an end to the American war. 

In studying his career it became obvious to me that the Americans were fighting for what they considered to be their traditional rights as Englishmen. The Declaration may be difficult to read or understand today but here I reproduce a brief explanatory essay.

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Every July 4 we celebrate Independence Day, the anniversary of the promulgation of our famed Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Most of us have heard the famous opening lines of the document, 

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

However, few have ever read the entire Declaration and even fewer have any understanding of the nature of the actual grievances that led the colonists to sever their ties with England and seek independence. Most readers don’t get past the following words.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

King George III of England was one of the nicest, most benevolent rulers that England ever had, but the Declaration portrayed him as a tyrannical despot. However, the real conflict between England and her American colonies was not between Monarchy and Democracy but between the rights of the British people represented as they were by their own Parliament, and the rights of the American colonists represented as they were by their own colonial assemblies. In this conflict no one was a greater supporter of the rights and authority of the British Parliament than the King.

For the most part the Declaration of Independence does not complain about violations of individual human rights but concentrates on what it claims has been a systematic attempt on the part of the government in England to violate the rights and privileges of colonial representative assemblies. 

The founding fathers believed these assemblies that represented the leading citizens and property owners in the various colonies were the sole bulwark against monarchical tyranny on the one hand, and democratic anarchy on the other. They claimed that the King and his colonial governors have repeatedly refused to put into operation laws passed by these assemblies.

•He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

•He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent should be obtained;

•He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature,…

•He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

In some cases the English government has even gone so far as to dissolve some of these representative assemblies and leave particular colonies without any form of self-government. The legal system, military defense, and tax collection have been taken out of the hands of the colonial representatives. Here are some examples:

•He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

•He has made the judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

•He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

•He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

In the end the Declaration claimed that it came down to a contest between their own local representative assemblies and a faraway legislature that did not represent them. Because they had come to deny the authority of the British Parliament, they never used the word Parliament in the document. 

There are elements in the Declaration that might seem offensive to modern ears. Jefferson and others in America opposed the efforts of a reforming British government to permit religious toleration of the large Catholic population in newly conquered Canada. For them Catholicism went hand in hand with despotism. The Declaration also complained about attempts on the part of the British government to prevent colonization of Indian territory. Indeed, it claimed that England was encouraging the native tribes.

Nevertheless, the leaders assembled in Congress insisted on their rights as Englishmen to govern themselves. They wanted government to be as close to home as possible. They would make their own laws, vote their own taxes when necessary, and be responsible for their own legal and military systems. They did not want to be governed by a faraway government that had little concern for their interests or welfare.

It was true that the founders were men of property and status. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Franklin were not common men. Democracy would come later. For the present they wanted to protect their right to self-government. The British government had declared itself “invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” To resist, they were prepared to risk all that they held dear.

•“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” 

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