Marble

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble

Augustus Caesar

Today was a cheerful departure, with freshly laundered clothes and revitalised after a really good night’s sleep. More than anything though, we had dispatched the stiff climb of the first 3 km last night, and could enjoy following the winding roads of the forested hills.

There seemed to be a particular focus on olive trees here, with a few in every garden, except for one bare yard where two tiny ponies appeared to be eking out a neglected existence with nothing to eat but dust and rubble.

But there were plenty of villas up here away from the built-up strip by the sea,

and a newly-painted white line along the road, led us to our café stop in Colombiera, where we sat on their beautiful patio terrace, admired the lusciousness of the plants growing in their enormous pots, and greeted a very cheerful Skateboard Dude when he turned up, thrilled with how the gently downward sloping asphalt seemed just made for him.

The bar was filled with the usual assortment of characterful old chaps, admiring bicycles, chucked out of their houses to go ‘walking the dog’ but really just falling into the bar, or in this case out into the little piazza where their coffees were brought to them.

Just across the road was an alimentari where I stocked up on a roll, cheese and ham for lunch, and then we joined the canal, a cool green ribbon to one side,

with lovely views up into the hills on the other. Each ridge was crowned with an impressive hilltop village, and we were glad that our path crossed the distance to Massa on a more-or-less low-level route today.

Some of the waterside gardens were lush and beautiful, filled with flourishing pots of plumbago, pomegranate trees and olives,

but there were other sections where the ground had been completely taken over by giant reed.

In order to cross the via Aurelia, the ancient Roman road constructed to connect Rome with the city of Luna and more known as the SS1, we needed to come off the canal and head through Man di Ferro, down here in the fertile plane a much wealthier area, with an upscale organic vineyard,

and masses of farms producing fruit and vegetables, and selling direct to the public. In one a farmer was hoeing weeds out of the lettuces growing in his polytunnels,

while evidence of the long growing season stood outside: the first courgette plants going over, and the new, young and vigorous plants coming online right next to then.

The grand highlight of today’s stage came next. The Roman city of Luna was named for its temple to the moon goddess.

The archaeological site comprises the temple, a forum and associated buildings, an amphitheatre, some houses of high-wealth individuals, a live excavation of a recently discovered house, and two floors of museums.

After buying our tickets and worshipping at the shrine of the black cat asleep on top of a light fitting high up on the wall, we decided first to walk around the city itself,

on the second of the Roman pavements of the visit so far. This one was made of marble slabs.

Luna was a city of marble. Geographically close to the quarries at Carrera which produced marble of exceptional quality and situated on the sea for easy transport, marble was promoted by Augustus for decorating private and public buildings to turn Rome into a city capable of competing with other major urban centers in the Mediterranean. Marble became fashionable politically as well as economically, and the city of Luna thrived. Luna’s marble was first used in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, inaugurated in 28 BC, and then in Augustus’s nearby home.

Wandering around the ruins it was difficult to imagine, with grassy fields in between the excavated buildings, what the city might have looked like. The forum was recognisable,

and the once-colonnaded main street was still visible,

and the severely ruined temple of the eponymous deity.

A row of shops made me think of our coffee stop this morning.

Some mosaics had been left in the excavated buildings, covered to protect them from the weather and quite hard to see,

but the real treasures and the real sense of the city was in the museums themselves.

The temple came to life through the statues of two generals with anatomically-shaped decorated cuirasses,

and through its marble columns and capitals.

The amphitheatre, located at some distance, was not part of the main excavations and we would have had to pay to visit separately.

But it was brought to life by the gladiatorial figures and weapons on the many oil lamps discovered in the temple of Luna itself, suggesting gifts as good luck totems for fights.

Luna was also a city of terracotta, used to decorate the outside of the buildings such as the front pediment of the temple.

The central decorative panel celebrating Luna herself, pictured with Apollo and Dionysus has survived in astonishing condition.

An extraordinary number of the tiles survived and have been painstakingly reassembled to give an idea of their original form.

The high status houses had a number of mosaic floors which still survive. That Luna was a seaside port was evident in this stunning mosaic showing local fish species and fanciful cupids riding dolphins and hunting fish in the teeming sea with tridents.

The walls of these houses were decorated with finally painted plaster,

And I thought of my many photographs of the flowers and plants and wondered whether this was a 2000-year-old equivalent.

The political life of the city was represented by some carved heads of political figures, including the triumvir Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who established Luna as a Roman colony in 177 BC.

Other poignant statues and heads suggested the wealthy who might have lived here.

One extraordinary bronze portrait head was almost photographic in its level of detail, and it was strange to think how the skill in a civilisation capable of such photorealist representation could be lost in its collapse, waiting until its rediscovery in the Renaissance.

If the faces were poignant, it was the everyday items which really brought home this was a city where real people lived. Who needed to sew their clothes,

light their homes,

serve food and drink,

wear jewelry.

One pair of gold earrings was so precious they were buried with the funerary goods in a grave of a middle-aged woman.

In the next door display the grave goods of a younger man in his 20s were displayed — his iron helmet with cheek-guards taken off and placed inside it, together with his sword in its scabbard, ritually bent to render it unusable, and the metal tip of his spear.

We don’t usually have the time to be real tourists and we felt energised by this fantastic experience; the visit did take a large chunk of time out of a full day’s walking, but it would have been a terrible shame to have missed it. The extra energy was good because we then had to hack along a good few kilometres of road until we reached the modern-day city of marble: Carrara.

We were conscious of the great marble quarries coming into view in the mountains to the north-east of us, and we found a little park where we could stop for lunch with a tantalising partial view.

You could tell it was a town of marble. There were marble pavements even in the scrappiest areas, and cool marble surrounds for windows and doors. Perhaps these were the off-cuts from more prestigious projects.

We were looking forward to the afternoon route which was going to take us up into the hills and we felt glad to pay the physical cost of the steep climb to be able to see the quarries up closer.

As we turned to head towards the mountains, we passed by the great marble workshops, with blocks as big as the ones that Michelangelo had used to create his David.

They were moved around by colossal gantries, and we could only imagine the delight with which the Romans would have greeted such technology.

In massive emporia were warehouses full of marble slabs — the champagne of the marble world. Pure white, or shot through with magnificent veins of colour.

We were pleased that the approach to the quarries themselves was prepared for by seeing the marble in its ancient context at Luna, then in its modern, in Carrara, and economic, in these marble workshops.

We were to be disappointed.

After toiling up the hill on a variety of tracks that at times felt surprisingly abandoned,

we realised that there was a wooded ridge between us and the quarries and so we would have no views. Only the very tips.

This meant that the best view we had had of the quarries was looking up from the plain as we crossed the Aventia river — the distant view of the soaring mountains with their white quarried scars and the zig-zag roads for the heavy vehicles was the best we were going to see of these monumental, 2000-yr-old excavations.

Instead there were half-built houses, construction abandoned long ago. I suspected they were begun illegally, and then stopped by the commune when the rogue builders had applied retrospectively for permits. There was a rash of this type of construction when I lived in Italy in the early 90s.

To get to the town of Massa, we had to contour around on the so-called Via dell’Uva, the grape road. It followed the ins and outs of the hillside’s rocky ridges and spurs and was shaped like one of those steady-hand games where you have to move a metal ring on a stick along a bent wire without touching it. If we couldn’t see the quarries, we were consoled that the road gave us fantastic views to the southwest, over the Marina di Massa to the Mediterranean, still reflecting the veiled sky.

At first the slopes below us were terraced, but then gradually had been abandoned, perhaps due to landslides. Then the grape road closed altogether for roadworks. We like all the other pilgrims just pushed through the barrier and carried on. There was only a small section which was actively being repaired,

and the rest of the road for a stretch of several kilometres felt as though people had just given up.

After a couple of rock ridges, where the trees were collapsing, even the good portions of road showed subsidence, and in any case the road was slowly being eaten up by the giant reed.

We emerged into the better-tended hills, although they were so phenomenally steep that we could not imagine how on earth people could face climbing all the way up to prune and harvest the grapes. The terraces towered above us.

Now we were approaching the outskirts of Massa the villas were becoming as wealthy as those on the outskirts of Sarzana at the start of the day.

Hilariously, terraces were made of scrap marble, there was so much of it to get rid of.

We walked into town on a back road, a little longer but much less busy, and it was very hot, in the high 20s, and it was good to keep away from traffic as much as possible.

The city seemed to have some kind of children’s event on — we briefly sat on a bench to collect ourselves but never found out what it was.

We were heading for the hostel in Palazzo Nizza — airy and light,

with terrific views out over the piazza (a temporary building site as the town hall is rebuilt).

Only Skateboard Dude was here, and Daniela (no wonder he had been so cheerful today!), and we had a room to ourselves with a lovely view of its own.

Well, to ourselves if you don’t count the tiny gecko.

Stats for the Day
Distance: 28.82 (two of these were the museum visit!)
Time: 6hrs 44
Temperature: 28°C