The marble mountains

The main piazza in Sarzana, right outside Lorenzo's gelateria

It was the last day of the festival and CZ had already had her last violin lesson two days before, so we decided go exploring. We went west, high over the Alpi Apuane (those craggy mountains we had seen the first day we drove in to Castelnuovo) to the Ligurian town of Sarzana, where our Italian tutor Paola had grown up.

Paola had left us with instructions to visit a certain gelateria and to ask for Lorenzo, saying, "La Paola ci manda." That means, "Paola sent us," but in a way that only Ligurians would say it, sort of like saying, "Hey, y'all" in the southern U.S. Lorenzo gave us a warm welcome and joked with us, but I didn't take his picture, because it didn't seem quite right. Here's the gelato, though:

As you can see from the photos above and below, there's something sun-bleached and beach-like about Sarzana. The buildings are whiter and include pastel colors. There's more marble (I wonder why!). And there are palm trees.

It was extremely hot in Sarzana, though, and there was a market taking up most of the town, and besides, there was something else I was really curious to see, so after lunch and a walking tour of the town, we got back into the car and headed to Luni.

Luni is an ancient Roman port that eventually lost its luster because the harbor silted up and moved a couple of miles outward. But at one time it was an important city. It had so many brilliant marble buildings that the barbarians, sailing by in their ships, mistook it for Rome--or so the story goes.

One practical reason the buildings in these photos (some temple steps and an amphitheater) don't look so lustruous anymore is that the Romans only put a veneer of marble on their buildings. Underneath was concrete made with rubble. So the marble was recycled long ago, likely to build the nearby towns, like Sarzana, that replaced Luni.

We eventually found the ruins and a small museum in the middle of some fields, past marble-year after marble-yard. As in Lucca, it took some archeological thinking to sort out what was what, but it was fun (if a little hot) wandering around along in the fields among 2000-year-old ruins. This is a spot that doesn't get a lot of tourism, unlike the nearby Cinque Terre, so the museum staff were very friendly. They even told us which was the most scenic route to take home.

So, why do I keep talking about marble, anyway? Because the Alpi Apuane mountains are where Carrara is. And you couldn't miss the marble even if you weren't looking for it, because the small coastal plain between the mountains and the coast is crammed with marble waiting to be shipped all over the world. If you looked east, you saw the high, mining-scarred face of the mountains. The marble dust runs down the crevices of the mountains like snow.

As we drove up the mountains to return to Castelnuovo, we had our most intensely "Are we supposed to be here?" experience of the trip. Not only did our car seem too big for the tiny roads, but once we had to make a three(or four)-point turn up a steep switchback just to keep going! And we kept meeting big trucks. At one point, a gas truck's reflector barely scraped by under our sideview mirror. But the people who drive these roads are used to narrow passes. Every time we met another car or truck, everything would slow to a crawl while both vehicles figured out how to pass each other.

As we approached the second town on our way up the mountain, we saw a place to stop, so we got out and looked towards the coast. It was hazy, and at first we thought we were just looking at a white, cloudy sky on the horizon. But when we got out the binoculars, we noticed boats in the whiteness, and glimmering sun on water. We were looking at the Mediterranean sea!

As we kept going up, the landscape began to resemble something out of The Lord of the Rings. Eventually there was so much marble that there wasn't even enough soil for trees to grow on, only shrubs and some (usually sparse) grass. We saw enormous cuts that looked like doors in the sides of the mountains. We went through tunnels of marble. (There's even a giant hole, a natural formation, at the top of one of these mountains.) And finally, when we started to come out the other side into the Garfagnana region, we found a beautiful little medieval town, Isola Santa, in the middle of the river.

So on our last day in Tuscany, we travelled in altitude, we travelled in culture, and we travelled in time.

1. Looking down the Alpi Apuan foothills towards the Mediterranean Sea 2. A turn in the road that wasn't even all that sharp (and gave us a place to take photos) 3. A door-like cut in the side of a mountain. 4. So much marble that nothing much can grow 5. One of my many attempts to take a photo of a tiny roadside shrine from a moving car. 6. Santa Isola, not far from Castelnuovo.