Marbled fancy

From the old pier of Forte dei Marmi, you can see them soaring in the sky, guarding the sea. The Apuan Alps are white in the clouds huddled over the peaks, they seem to be covered with snow even in August.

But it’s not snow, it’s not the white mantle of cirrus clouds to shine in the air. It’s the noblest and most ancient resource of the territory of Versilia: marble. The greatest works of the Renaissance, churches, bell towers, baptismal fonts, palaces, sculptures, were born here, born out of a milky rock even before from the hand of the greatest sculptors of the story.

Thanks to its distinguishing cultural vitality, Pietrasanta boasts the nickname of “Little Athens”. Haven of eclectic artists, designers, architects looking for inspiration and lovers of good food, the city has given rise to a dense network of workshops in continuous turmoil.

More than 200 workshops producing original and innovative objects: impossible to distinguish on the surfaces of fountains, capitals, bathroom fittings, decorations for gardens, statues, the boundary between manual skill and pure inspiration.

Pietrasanta is an inexhaustible source of material experimentation: bronze, onyx, glass, slate, hard stones flanked by marble, embed in specialization, professionalism, unceasing imagination of masters and their apprentices.

The Museum of Sketches shows in detail the abundance of projects. Here, every idea, every suggestion can come true, customized according to the wishes of the customer or the inspiration of the craftsman.

If matter, color, expressiveness have a border, they lose it once arrived in Pietrasanta and Forte dei Marmi. Cult place of the nineteenth-century Italian aristocracy and of the great intellectuals of the 1900s, get lost too in the emotions that the cities of marble continue to generate.