Bronze Studios and Marble Quarries

Today was a long day, but one of the best I've had in a while. Today I woke up at 6am to go on a field trip with my sculpture class. We visited Pietrasanta, pictured below. It was probably one of the cutest sea side Italian towns I've ever seen!

To say that Pietrasanta is an artist's town is a bit of an understatement. I have never come across so many bronze, marble, and mosaic studios in my entire life. Below is a picture from the Barsanti mosaic studio in Pietrasanta. This was my favorite studio because I have loved mosaics ever since taking Latin and to see how they are actually made (very different from what I thought) was really amazing. Apparently, different artists work on different sections of the mosaic piece. Because of this, tiles are divided by sections so that the sections can eventually be pieced together like a puzzle. Below is a picture of a person, and as you can see there are a ton of different skin color tones. The piece below would be one section of an entire mosaic. This particular studio happens to have a huge overseas business, and even has a mosaic mural at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in LA!

At the same Barsanti facility, there was also a marble sculpture studio. With this visit, I learned to really appreciate marble sculptures because I completely underestimated how long it takes to carve a single piece, even a small one. Even though this facility uses a robot to cut the pieces of marble into more manageable sizes and sometimes even to carve a small portion of the piece, the majority of every single marble sculpture you come across has been done entirely or almost entirely by hand, using chisels, hammers, and files. 

From there, we had our lunch break which turned out to be pretty stressful. We only had 20 minutes for lunch because we had to drive 40 minutes to Carrara to see the marble quarries. My friends and I went to a small shop to get calzones, and the lady in charge said it would only take 10 minutes. Well, it ended up taking nearly 30 minutes, and we almost missed our bus. Luckily, the professor chaperoning the trip waited for us. Not a good start to Friday the 13th!

Then, we went up to Carrara to visit marble quarries. The picture below may just seem like a mountain to you, but all the white on the mountain is actually marble that workers carve out.

The bus dropped us off, and we ended up hiking up steep hills to see marble quarries. It probably wasn't the best idea with my hurt ankle and knee, but going uphill was fine so I went anyway. Below not even half of what we hiked.

Pretty soon, we came across huge piles of already cut marble. Apparently all the marble from the Lincoln Memorial, the National Gallery of London, and a ton of other famous locations comes from Pietrasanta and Carrara. 

Below is a picture of me, pictured with less than half the height of the pile of marble we came across. It gives you perspective on how tall the pile was in relation to us!

And below is a view of the mountains covered in marble to the left, a small town, and mountains with snow to the right.

After hiking up even further, we finally reached the location where workers are currently cutting the marble. If you look closely, you can see holes in the mountain where workers have begun to go inside to dig more marble out. 

With all the excitement of visiting the studios and quarries, we got some time to relax... We went to the beach on our way back to Florence! Today was a beautiful, warm day-- the warmest we've had yet-- and it was perfect for a walk along the ocean. It makes me miss California, and it makes me even more excited to start school at Laguna College of Art + Design in the fall!

We ended up getting back to Florence past 6pm, and I am so exhausted so...

Ciao for now!