Destinations

Tirrenian Sea Coastline

Massa Carrara – Pietrasanta – Colonnata – Lunigiana

This Tuscan land stretches north-west to to Liguria and north-east to Emilia Romagna, it is known for marble quarries and art workshops, for the stylish  Costa Versiliana, and for the ancient pre-Roman relics, medieval castles and a rich and varied gastronomy in Lunigiana.

The Marble Quarries are those places where for centuries the precious white Carrara marble has been digged out and processed before becoming  great sculptures and major architectural ornaments.  Some of them are outdoor, visible inside the mountain and appearing as tiers of a huge amphitheatre, because of the white walls depth and the  symmetrical shape of working layers. In the past, the extracted blocks were sent down the steep rocky slopes of the quarries  nowadays they are transported on trucks to the port of Marina di Carrara, where they handle the most part of the shipments. The remaining part is reduced into slabs of different thickness, then polished to provide raw material for panels, ornaments, stairs, and other accessories in marble. In the Province of Massa Carrara there are over a hundred sawmills equipped for this operation  and they are so higly specialized, that they work with marble and granite coming from all over the world.

Sculptors instead are brought to choose the piece of marble to create their sculpure, then they come to the famous Carrara laboratories specialized in the reproduction in exact scale of the provided sketches. The artisans in this sector are highly specialized and implement manually roughing blocks, often to finish the works, controlled by the artists only in the final stage.

We organize visits to quarries, workshops, and the Museum of the sketches of Pietrasanta.

Pietrasanta Preminent cultural center of the territory of Versilia and ” Elected Land ” for the numerous Italian and foreign artists, who in the years have contributed to urban works and donations. Amongst others, Fernando Botero, the Spanish artist whose paunchy warrior stands at guard of the village entrance and in 1993 he painted the Heaven’s Gate and the Hell’s Gate frescoes in the Church of Mercy (della Misericordia). We suggest you take avantage from the point of view to the urban centre of Pietrasanta from the fortress of “Sala”, overlooking Piazza Duomo, the Cathedral with its red tower, the Moroni Palace, the St. Augustine facade, the tower of the Hours.

Lunigiana is the region in the far north of Tuscany, surrounded by the Apennines, the Alps and the Ligurian Sea, includes fourteen municipalities of middle and upper Val di Magra in Tuscany and the municipalities of Sarzana and Luni in Liguria (ancient Roman colony from which its name comes from), vertically crossed by the religious pilgrimage way “Via Francigena”.

We recommend a visit to the Castle Fosdinovo Malaspina, the Castle Verrucola of Fivizzano (by appointment on Friday), the Castle of Terrarossa today Hostel along the Via Francigena, the castle of Pianagro that houses the museum of the ” Statue Stele “of Pontremoli, which contains all the mysterious  anthropomorphic statues, male and female, in sandstone, which were built by the ancient peoples who lived in the Val di Magra in the two millennia before the Romanization.

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