Carrara, a town of Northern Italy, 30 miles NW. of Leghorn by rail. It is situated on the Avenza, near its mouth in the Mediterranean, and is surrounded by the marble hills which have made its celebrity. The town and its inhabitants are wholly given up to the marble trade. There are above 400 marble-quarries, larger or smaller, in the vicinity of the town, though very few furnish the marble used for statuary. The marble is a white saccharoid limestone, which derives its value to the sculptor from its texture and purity. It was formerly supposed to be of Archæan age, but is now known to be a metamorphosed Jurassic limestone. The quarries are on the side of the mountains, a branch of the Apennines, at heights varying from 500 to 3500 feet.
The mountains, whose jagged peaks glitter in the sun, furnish, happily, an inexhaustible supply of marble; for to produce the 150,000 annually exported probably 500,000 tons are quarried, the balance being wasted—for the appliances for quarrying are of the most primitive, and many a blasting produces merely useless fragments. In these quarries, which have been worked for more than two thousand years, some 5000 men are regularly employed. Besides the quarrymen, the marble employs innumerable marble-cutters in the town, together with tombstone and other statuary of the humbler kinds, as well as sculptors. It should be added that marble similar to that of Carrara is quarried also at Massa and elsewhere. The United States imports in some years 25,000 tons of Carrara marble, at from 300 francs to 1400 francs per cubic metre. Pop. 12,300.