Michelangelo’s Muse

It began, as all memorable escapades often do, with a bout of indecision. My partner and I—then ensconced in the Renaissance splendour of Florence—were planning our first weekend away. We rummaged through the usual catalogue: Cinque Terre, too picture-perfect; Siena, a textbook illustration of Tuscany; Lake Como, haunted by the phantom glamour of Clooney. And then, as if the cosmos itself had grown weary of our dithering and decided to intervene—though I am convinced that the universe occasionally moonlights as a travel agent—we stumbled upon Carrara.

Carrara is a city celebrated for its marble, for the quarries that pierce the mountains like the veins of an ancient, slumbering giant. Truth be told, I had never given stone more than a passing thought—beyond the occasional one in my shoe or the dismay of stubbed toes. Marble, to me, had always existed as a polished abstraction, the sort of thing confined to hotel lobbies and living rooms: cool, aloof, emotionally unavailable.

And yet, against all prior intuition, Carrara drew us in. There is a peculiar vitality here, the kind that slips under your skin; light brushes the mountains with a warmth that seeps into the bones; and the silence is not empty, but dense with the wisdom of centuries. It was our first trip away together, and somehow this city of stone made us feel more rooted in the present and, paradoxically, lighter than ever.

We discovered a quaint B&B online. Arriving at Carrara Avenza station, we hailed a cab. Our driver, a man whose gestures were as elliptical as his explanations, halted at the base of a slope, gestured vaguely uphill, and intoned that our B&B was “up there.” Bags onto the pavement, we set off, imagining, of course, that it would be just around the corner. It was not. To reach it required what can only be described as a Himalayan climb, my partner valiantly dragging our luggage skywards while I followed behind, a hapless emissary of moral support, breathless yet marvelling at the mountainous absurdity of our first excursion.

This home clung to the hillside with the stubbornness of a mountain goat. The climb itself felt almost like a pilgrimage—steep, sweat-slicked, lightly tinged with dread—but the payoff was immediate and absolute. Perched on the slope, the house gazed out over Carrara’s untamed, marble-sculpted terrain. Inside, the place was intimate, family-run, consisting of no more than maybe eight rooms. The entrance opened onto a cosy breakfast nook, where a moka pot waited like a tiny altar to ritualised caffeine, flanked by packaged croissants, cookies, teacakes and an assortment of books and board games.

Our room was spare yet meticulous, and its balcony framed a panorama that might have made a filmmaker weep with envy. From there—and even from the bathroom—we drank in the sweeping vistas, tea in hand, as a chill threaded the air and a gentle drizzle began to lace the hills with silver. The B&B, in its thoughtfulness, provided us with umbrellas, and so we set off, umbrellas in hand, to lose ourselves in the labyrinthine heart of Carrara’s city centre, ready for whatever the marble city might decide to reveal.

Carrara’s streets twist and turn, curl and dip in gentle loops, as though the city were taking your arm and steering you into an unhurried waltz. Family-run shops spill their pride onto the pavements, displaying treasures wrought by hand—not the glossy, soulless trinkets of the tourist trade, but objects infused with the marrow of the city’s marble legacy, all telling tales of quarries and the patient hands that shaped them. We bought marble dice, a thimble, magnets and mini sculptures. By midday, shutters descend with a ceremonious sigh, shopkeepers retreating for long, restorative siestas, leaving the streets hushed—save for the occasional delicate clink of a distant cafe cup or the rustle of a wandering breeze. Cobblestones lead to cosy trattorias and mellow wine bars.

We wandered toward Carrara’s Piazza Alberica. The Monumento a Maria Beatrice d’Este stands sentinel, watching over the square. Pietro Fontana’s 1824 statue casts her as Minerva: staff and scroll in hand, an eagle by her side. At the base, bas-reliefs—bassorilievo, in the tongue of the country—trace histories in chiselled gestures. A lion-topped fountain rises at her feet, a guardian of potable water.

Fontana’s Maria Beatrice D’Este, Piazza Alberica.

Piazza Alberica.

We walked through the city, letting its twists and cobbles guide us, until we arrived at Caffetteria Leon d’Oro, poised in the square with the precision of a theatre proscenium. The cafe carried the tones of a classic Italian bar. My partner had an espresso, and I, a cappuccino, accompanied by bread topped with tomatoes and basil, pastries, and cookies. For lunch, we gathered paper bags and filled them with the day’s spoils from the local supermarket—fresh warm bread, local cheeses, Lardo di Colonnata (the region’s famed lard), and fruit still redolent of sun. Carrara is a city that lives small but deep: even the most aimless stroll can yield a hidden sculpture tucked into a private garden, a faded fresco glimpsed down a library corridor, or the sudden unveiling of distant mountains at the end of a long street.

Coffee, bites, and people-watching from Leon d’Oro.

In Piazza Antonio Gramsci, also historically known as Piazza d’Armi, stands Stefano Ricci’s marble tribute to Pellegrino Rossi Carraresi (1787–1848), an Italian-born, naturalised French and Swiss economist, jurist, and statesman, whose mind and ambition once rippled far beyond the city’s stone-clad streets, shaping 19th-century Italy through law, politics, and scholarship.

Ricci’s Pellegrino Rossi Carraresi in Piazza Antonio Gramsci/Piazza d’Armi.

We meandered through until we stumbled upon a park, where the eye is seized by an almost impossible marvel: the Floating Stone. Kenneth Davis’s 1979 kinetic marble sphere, weighing nearly two tons, hovers above water. Nearby, Palazzo Cybo Malaspina, the historic former residence of the Cybo-Malaspina dynasty and today home to Carrara’s Academy of Fine Arts, watches over the scene, lending its centuries-old gravitas.

Next to Carrara’s Academy of Fine Arts in Piazza Accademia, sits Carlo Fontana’s 1900 Monumento a Pietro Tacca, homage to the city’s Baroque master (1577–1640). Tacca sits with sculptor’s cap perched jauntily, and an apron draped with the ritual of a craftsman at work.

Fontana’s Pietro Tacca at Via Verdi, 3, Piazza Accademia.

Gino Nicoli’s bust of Angelo Pelliccia (1791–1863) commemorates the physician and philosopher, while Roberto Fantoni’s tribute to Giordano Bruno honours ideas that dared to defy convention. Framed by marble balustrades, a sunlit gazebo, and the playful waters of the Fontana dell’Elefantino, the square is a civic stage and artistic archive, a place where Carrara’s pride, history, and mastery of stone coalesce into a single, resonant tableau.

Nicoli’s Angelo Pelliccia, and Fantoni’s Giordano Bruno.

We wandered a little further through the city. Locals were stocking up on their weekly groceries at the farmers’ market, students drifted back from class in loose clusters, and buskers played to passing tourists. Stalls spilled over with linen shirts, cotton tees, skirts and socks, alongside the occasional vintage curiosity: trays of costume jewellery glinting in the sun. Vendors laid out arrays of meats and cheeses for tasting.

We were tired from our longish stroll and made our way back up the steep incline to our room to rest for a while. Fortunately, the town had spared us rain during our wanderings. But when we woke from our evening nap, a heavy shower was falling. Umbrellas in hand once again, we descended, clinging to each other as we navigated the slick street. We reached the town centre, hoping to find dinner at the first restaurant we spotted—but that, as it turned out, was not to be. There were long queues everywhere, and we put our names on a couple of waitlists.

As we wandered through the rain, dodging puddles, a dim light beckoned from a corner. We chanced upon Il Rebacco. Seeking refuge from the rain, which had softened the streets into a muted lull, we slipped inside. Outside, the town lay hushed under the steady pour; within, the restaurant thrummed with life. The diners—almost all locals—seemed to be resuming conversations over pasta, wine and bread, as though the evening were a continuation rather than a beginning.

We took a table upstairs, where the host promised a little quiet and privacy. The menu was not extensive, but offered enough variety to satisfy us that evening. My partner chose the creamy pumpkin soup with burrata, while I surrendered to a seafood pasta.

The following morning, we set off on a tour of stone, bound for the marble quarries that have long made Carrara famous. At the appointed hour, an off-road jeep rumbled up, its tyres crunching over the cobbles as though announcing our departure to the hills. Behind the wheel sat a guide who seemed part geologist, part historian, and wholly local—the sort of person whose knowledge ran as deep as the quarries themselves, and whose stories folded centuries into the span of a morning.

We were a group of five. Our guide vowed to shepherd us through vast caverns of marble, carved and coaxed into existence by centuries of human ambition, sweat and imagination, after which he would take us to a local joint for a tasting of Carrara’s cheese, jam and lard.

Quarries sprawled across the mountainside like beautiful scars etched into living stone, framed by the Apennines in shades of ash, slate, ivory, and deep forest green. The road curled along the cliffs in serpentine loops—mostly a scenic delight, partly a test of nerve. Terraced like the stairway of a colossal, gorgeous giant, Carrara’s marble shimmered beneath a sky streaked with clouds, while machines scuttled across it like ants at a god’s feet. And when light struck the stone just so, it glowed—like bone, like moonlight, like something sacred wrested from the earth itself.

After exploring a couple of quarries, he led us to a small marble museum—a repository of Carrara’s sculpted memory. He pointed out the very mountain from which Michelangelo sourced the marble for his David, then steered us towards a shop selling marble homewares. To conclude the tour, he drove us to the summit. From here, Carrara lay beneath us—a city hewn from living stone, its pale veins catching the light as though the mountains themselves had released their artistry into the world. Marble was everywhere: fragments scattered like confetti, towering blocks asserting their mass, pools of water holding the sun, rugged slopes etched with centuries of labour. Above us, the sky stretched open and immense. The rain had cleared, the air was sharp and cool, the sun gilded everything it touched, and from that altitude, looking down upon the city and its quarries, it was nothing short of magic—a moment suspended between earth and light, past and present, stone and wonder. This was a moment.

By the day’s end, we were utterly spent, despite having spent hours being chauffeured across the city. We planned to keep the evening light after tastings, yet the moment we collapsed onto our bed, hunger made an insistent return. Outside, rain began again as a murmur, then escalated to a drumbeat so fierce that the street lamps along the slope flickered and quivered in protest. My partner, assuming the role of hero for the second time that day, braved the cold, the wind, and a wilful umbrella, navigating near-darkness guided only by the thin beam of his phone torch, to bring us burgers from a local bar. That night, our dinner was half-warm burgers and fries, consumed in bed, punctuated by glimpses of the city and its marble-framed vistas, rain-soaked and ethereal, beyond the window.