Carrara marble

[1] By the late 20th century Carrara's highest-grade marble had run out;[citation needed] the considerable ongoing production is of stone with a greyish tint, or streaks of black or grey on white.

[2][3] In the Middle Ages, most of the quarries were owned by the Marquis Malaspina who in turn rented them to families of Carrara masters who managed both the extraction and transport of the precious material.

[4] Just to cite an example, starting from 1474, first the Maffioli, then the Buffa, supplied the marble for the facade of the Certosa di Pavia, also taking care of the transport of the material which, by ship, after having circumnavigated Italy, reached the construction site of the monastery after having sailed up the Po and the Ticino by boat.

[7] The city of Massa, in particular, saw much of its plan redesigned (new roads, plazas, intersections, pavings) in order to make it worthy of an Italian country's capital.

[1] The marble from Carrara was used for some of the most remarkable buildings in Ancient Rome: It was also used in many sculptures of the Renaissance including Michelangelo's David (1501–1504)[15][16] whilst the statue to Robert Burns, which commands a central position in Dumfries, was carved in Carrara by Italian craftsmen working to Amelia Robertson Hill's model.

[17] Other notable occurrences include: Carrara marble has been designated by the International Union of Geological Sciences as a Global Heritage Stone Resource.

[20] Calcite, obtained from an 80 kg sample of Carrara marble,[21] is used as the IAEA-603 isotopic standard in mass spectrometry for the calibration of δ18O and δ13C.

The black yeast Micrococcus halobius can colonize Carrara marble by forming a biofilm and producing gluconic, lactic, pyruvic and succinic acids from glucose, as seen in the Dionysos Theater of the Acropolis in Athens.