The marble quarries of Carrara and Colonnata, from Montignoso

Getting there

From Montignoso to Carrara you go by the Aurelia or by the motorway, leaving at Carrara; from there you climb towards the quarries following the signs for the Ospedale, the hospital, and then for Miseglia, Ponti di Vara and Fantiscritti. The roads of the basins are those of the marble lorries: narrow, uphill, with loaded trucks coming down on weekdays.

• The road to Fantiscritti, the one that the operator of the tunnel quarry also gives for motorhomes: from the Carrara motorway exit to the Turigliano roundabout, then towards the Ospedale di Carrara, piazza Marco e Francesco in Miseglia, the Ponti di Vara and Fantiscritti. It is the road of the tour coaches, which the Comune allows up to a length of 12.5 metres: a motorhome fits, but you drive slowly and let those coming down pass. Cars can continue to the entrance of Ravaccione; motorhomes, motorbikes and coaches stop at Fantiscritti
• The centre of Carrara is a building site: since 3 November 2025, under the Comune's order 1162 of 31 October 2025, the works to consolidate the covering of the Canal del Rio have changed the traffic arrangements in the centre, and for this reason tour coaches go up to the basins by the Strada dei Marmi, the lorry road from the port to the quarries. The Strada dei Marmi remains for marble vehicles and for coaches with a permit: motorhomes go up by the hospital road
• The Fantiscritti car park is large and free, for about a hundred cars and twenty coaches, according to the operator, with public toilets: Carrara Marble Tour, which runs it next to its ticket office, writes that it is designed for caravans and bulky vehicles too. From there you walk to the Cava Museo, the off-road vehicles and the tunnel minibus
• To Colonnata you go up from Carrara through Codena and Bedizzano, on the village's narrow road. Below the village there is a free car park, about three hundred metres from the square; in piazza Palestro, at the top, the car park is small, next to the drinking fountain and the public toilets
• By bus: Autolinee Toscane runs from Carrara to Colonnata with the L50 line, by way of Bergiola and Bedizzano; the L49 goes to Miseglia and the L48 to Torano. No line reaches Fantiscritti. For anyone who leaves the motorhome at the campsite and only wants to go up to Colonnata, the bus avoids the narrow road
• To sleep you do not need a stopover in Carrara: you go back to the campsites of the Partaccia, at Marina di Massa, about twenty minutes away, which are the stopovers on the Montignoso page. On the coast of Marina di Carrara the motorhome areas are private

Practical information

Go up in the morning: the tunnel visit takes three quarters of an hour, the off-road ride an hour, and Colonnata is kept for lunch. In the tunnel it is cool all year, while on the quarry yards in summer the white marble is dazzling.

Contacts

Where it is

Fantiscritti, Carrara · Toscana

You set off from

Notes

• The tunnel quarry of Ravaccione, run by Marmotour: from Fantiscritti a minibus takes you in three minutes to the entrance, then you walk inside the mountain for about four hundred metres, on a single level, in a working quarry, with the machines in their places. The largest hall is called the Cattedrale di marmo, the marble cathedral, about 24,000 cubic metres of empty space; there is a mural of the Creation of about 160 square metres, and a cellar where wine is aged in the quarry. The visit takes about 45 minutes. In 2026 the departures, according to Marmotour, are from 28 March to the end of May at 11:00, 12:00 and 13:00 on weekdays and until 15:00 on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays; in June, July and August from 11:00 to 14:00 on weekdays and until 15:00 at weekends; in September, October and on 1 and 2 November every day from 11:00 to 14:00, with a departure every hour. You need to be there ten minutes before, otherwise you wait for the next tour. The 2026 price list: 15 euros from 18 years, 10 euros from 12 to 17, 5 euros from 6 to 11, free up to 5 years. Out of season visits are by arrangement
• The off-road ride among the open-cast quarries, run by Carrara Marble Tour, which has its ticket office at via Fantiscritti 2: six eight-seat off-road vehicles with a driver, who speaks Italian and English, leave every twenty or thirty minutes, every day including public holidays, from 1 March to 2 November, from 10:00 to 17:00. The ride takes about an hour and climbs to quarry number 83, Canalgrande alto, at about a thousand metres, where around thirty quarries are at work: you see the machines and the blocks up close, and from the viewpoint, when it is clear, you see the sea, Portovenere, the Cinque Terre and the Gulf of La Spezia. On the way down you drive on the roads where a chase in the Bond film Quantum of Solace was shot. The price list online, undated, says 15 euros for adults and 7.50 euros for children up to 6 years; on request, at the Il Poggio restaurant next to the ticket office, the quarryman's breakfast with lardo di Colonnata and a glass of red. Phone 0585 779673
• The Cava Museo di Fantiscritti was put together by Walter Danesi over forty years of research: tools, objects and life-size statues that tell of the quarryman's trade and of family life up to 1960, and of how marble was quarried, brought down the valley and worked before machines. The visit is guided, takes 45 minutes and must always be booked. The price list online, undated, is written for groups: 10 euros per person, with at least ten people, from 6 to 8 euros for schools. Phone 348 3138538 or 334 7870741
• The quarries are not a park: you can only go in with a licensed guide, with the staff of a quarry that organises visits or with an operator of off-road or minibus tours, writes Visit Tuscany, the Regione's tourist board. The yards are working sites, with blocks weighing tens of tonnes, diggers and lorries, and the roads of the basins belong to them: you stop only in the car parks
• How marble is quarried: the first quarrymen drove wedges of fig wood into the cracks in the rock and wet them, and the swelling wood split off the block; the Romans cut a groove along the line of the cut and hammered iron wedges into it. Then came blasting, the varata. At the end of the nineteenth century came the helical wire, a steel cable a few hundred metres long that ran over pulleys carrying water and sand, and cut the marble at twenty centimetres an hour; today it is cut with diamond wire. A huge slice of rock, the bancata, is detached from the mountain, toppled onto the yard on a bed of debris, and divided into blocks. Before anything else, the tecchiaiolo, hanging from a rope, cleared the face of rock that might fall
• How the blocks came down: the oldest way was to let them roll, and it was banned by law when lizzatura took hold. The block, tied onto a wooden sledge, the lizza, slid down the ravaneti, the slopes of quarry debris, held back from above by ropes wound around posts driven into the rock: in front, the capo lizza put the parati under the sledge, cherry wood boards soaped by the youngest member of the team, and gave the signal to the mollatori, the rope men, to let out the ropes. If the load ran away, it swept away whoever was in front. At the poggio caricatore, the loading yard at the bottom of the via di lizza, the blocks went onto ox carts, later onto the railway, and from the 1920s onto lorries
• The marble railway and the Ponti di Vara: the Ferrovia Marmifera Privata di Carrara, a steam railway, climbed from the port of Marina di Carrara up to 445 metres, at Ravaccione, with seventeen stations and loading yards, among them Fantiscritti, Ravaccione and Colonnata. The Ponti di Vara, the stone arches over the Miseglia valley, were built for the branch into the basins, opened on 15 May 1890. The railway closed in 1964, and its bridges and tunnels have become roads: you cross the bridges on the way up to Fantiscritti, and on arrival, on the yard, there used to be the station
• Michelangelo's marble: statuario, the purest and rarest white, is the marble of statues. Michelangelo came to Carrara to choose the blocks in person, and in piazza del Duomo there is the house where he lived; of the quarries he used, the Polvaccio quarry at Torano no longer exists, consumed by centuries of digging. The CARMI, the Carrara and Michelangelo museum, at via Sorgnano 42, tells the story of Michelangelo, Carrara and marble; according to the museum, from 1 June to 14 September it is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9:30 to 12:30 and from 17:00 to 20:00, and from 15 September to 31 May Tuesday to Thursday in the morning, Friday in the afternoon, Saturday and Sunday all day; it is closed on Mondays
• The Museo Civico del Marmo, the civic marble museum, at viale XX Settembre 85, has been closed since 2023: the Chamber of Commerce, which owns the building, began the renovation work in November 2024, and the reopening has no date. Of its collections, the Roman quarry can be seen for real at Fossacava
• Fossacava, on the road to Colonnata, is the largest Roman quarry in the area, shaped like an amphitheatre, about two hundred metres long, from which bardiglio, the grey veined marble, was quarried. According to the Comune, in summer 2026 the archaeological area was open every day, public holidays included: in June from 10:00 to 15:00, in July and August from 9:00 to 12:00, in September from 10:00 to 13:00. Phone 335 1047436
• Colonnata stands at the head of the valley of its basin, eight kilometres from Carrara, in the Parco delle Alpi Apuane, the Apuan Alps park: it grew up around 40 BC for the quarry slaves, and on 24 August 1944 it was burned by the Nazis and Fascists. It is made of stone and of marble left bare in the doorways and the steps; in piazza Palestro is the monument to the quarryman, from the square you look down the valley, and the church of San Bartolomeo has marble altars and a seventeenth century crucifix. Just above the village you see the Gioia quarries, cut in steps
• PGI lardo di Colonnata: the fat from the pig's back is laid in layers in the conche, basins carved from blocks of marble from the Canaloni, rubbed with garlic, with sea salt, black pepper, rosemary, fresh garlic and spices; it is made from September to May and aged for at least six months. It has been PGI since 26 October 2004 and the production area is the village of Colonnata alone; according to the Fondazione Qualivita there are fourteen producers. For centuries it was the quarrymen's everyday fare, with bread and tomato. You buy it in the village's larderie, the lardo shops, which slice it at the counter, and taste it in the bars and trattorias on the square. The Associazione Tutela del Lardo di Colonnata, the producers' association, is based at via Palestro 3
• The centre of Carrara, in brief: the Duomo di Sant'Andrea, with its façade in bands of white and grey marble and its great Gothic rose window, and its 33 metre bell tower; in piazza del Duomo the fontana del Gigante, the fountain of the Giant, an Andrea Doria in the guise of Neptune that Baccio Bandinelli left roughed out, placed there in 1563, and Michelangelo's house. Just below is piazza Alberica, with its seventeenth century palaces, and nearby the Accademia di Belle Arti, the academy of fine arts, in the palace of the Cybo Malaspina. In 2026 the White Carrara festival left about thirty marble design works in the streets of the centre, which are staying
• Campocecina, the viewpoint: you go up from Carrara on the main road towards Gragnana, Castelpoggio and Fosdinovo, and after Castelpoggio you turn off for Campocecina. At the piazzale dell'Uccelliera, at 1,190 metres, the viewpoint looks down on the basins, the town, the port and the whole coast as far as the Versilia; higher up, at the Acquasparta, at 1,275 metres, there is a free car park with about twenty spaces and the park with the sculptures of twelve artists from the 2001 symposium. The rifugio Carrara, the mountain hut, has been closed since November 2025, when the managers left, and the CAI is looking for someone to take it on. On weekdays loaded lorries from the reopened Castelbaito quarry come down the road
• The Biennale di scultura of Carrara, the sculpture biennial, founded in 1957, had fourteen editions up to 2010, with Picasso, Henry Moore, Miró, Botero, Fontana and Cattelan: the works bought by the Comune are at the mudaC, the Museo delle Arti, at via Canal del Rio 1

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