Its motto is Latin: "Fortitudo mea in rota" ("My strength is in the wheel"), a reference firstly to the marble shipping industry from Roman times onwards.

The current town originated from the borough built to house workers in the marble quarries created by the Romans after their conquest of Liguria in the early second century BC.

[5] In the early Middle Ages it was a Byzantine and then Lombard possession, and then, it was under the Bishops of Luni who started to write the city's history when the Emperor Otto I gave it to them.

After the death of Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan in 1447, Carrara was fought over by Tommaso Campofregoso, lord of Sarzana, and again the Malaspina family, who moved here the seat of their signoria in the second half of the 15th century.

During the unification of Italy age, Carrara was the seat of a popular revolt led by Domenico Cucchiari, and was a center of Giuseppe Mazzini's revolutionary activity.

According to a New York Times article of 1894 many violent revolutionists who had been expelled from Belgium and Switzerland went to Carrara in 1885 and founded the first anarchist group in Italy.

According to the Grand Orient of Italy, the coat of arms of Carrara contains the Comacina wheel, symbol of the ancient master stonemasons of Como.