Colonnata and its marble fields

Colonnata is an appreciated tourist destination, birthplace of the poet and sculptor Danese Cattaneo, one of Torquato Tasso's friends. The village is situated on a rocky spur among the white flows of the "ravaneti" (marble stony paths) coming from the surrounding quarries. Many remains, which have been found here from the 18th century, witness the exploitation of these quarries even in the Roman Age.
The S. Bartolomeo parish church has in its choir the rests of an altar-piece with the engraving of S. Andrea, S. Bartolomeo and S. Pietro by Andrea di Franceschi Guardi and a beautiful 16th century marble crucifix, which is ascribed by popular tradition to Michelangelo Buonarrotti.
Colonnata is renowned also for the delicious bacon-fat. It is obtained through an appropriate use of spices and through the conservation in marble basins, which make it famous and demanded all over the world.
From the top of the village a path leads to Vergheto, where secular chestnut-trees and ancient pastoral settlings lie, amongst suggestive foreshortening of the Apuan Alps.
Colonnata's field is the oriental one: it marks the boundary with the quarrying area of Massa. The marble basins supply the territory with the greatest production of marble: about 41000 tons a month.
The most quarried marbles are: the common white and the veined white but even the broullè white is typical in this field. However all the variety are represented here and the compactness of the rock allows high yields. A town street leads from Carrara to the villages of Bedizzano and Colonnata, skirting the east side of the valley. The first traces of the excavation are visible either from the edges of the cartway just after Bedizzano or from the opposite slope of the valley, where the old tracks of the marble railway runs now inside now outside the tunnel.
Once you have reached a place called "Il Calagio", you can see on the left the entrance of a road zigzagging on the slope. It leads to remarkable extractive areas even from a historical point of view.
The main road leads to the village of Colonnata, but on the right there is a diversion rising to the top of Gioia, which is the seat of one of the most imposing quarry in the open air of the whole territory.

The Majestic of S. Michele