The road down the coast from Spezia is marked on the maps as perfectly flat, but within a dozen kilometres, before Arcola is reached, is as stiff a couple of hair-pin turns as one will remember ever having come across suddenly in his travels. They are not formidable hills, perhaps, but they are surprising, and since one has to drop down again immediately to sea level they seem entirely unnecessary.
The river Magra which enters the sea just east of Spezia divided the Genoese territory from that of Tuscany.
“Macra che per cammin corto
Lo Gonovese parta dal Toscano.”
—Dante, “Paradisio.”
Sarzana is not a tourist point, but the traveller by road will not be in a hurry to pass it by. It has, curiously enough, an Albergo della Nuova York, built on the fortification walls of feudal days. It is not for this, though, that one lingers at Sarzana. The Bonapartes were originally descended from Sarzana ancestry. It was proven by contemporary documents that a certain Buonaparte, a notary, lived here in 1264. Supposedly, it was this limb of the law who became the chief of the Corsican family.
The old feudal castle of Sarzana, with its round tower, its moat and its later Renaissance gateway is the very ideal of mouldy mediævalism.
From Sarzana, it is, figuratively speaking, but a step to Carrara and Massa, the centres of the marble industry. Of all the materials the artist requires, none is so much sought after as the pure white marble of Carrara. The sculptured marble of Carrara goes out into the world from thousands of ateliers to thousands of resting places but it all comes from this great white mountainside in the Apennines which has made the region famous and rich. This little Tuscan town of Carrara owes its all to its, seemingly, inexhaustible stores of milk-white, fine-grained marbles. More especially is the marble of Carrara in demand for statuary; but in all the finer forms of carven stone it finds its place supreme.
Men and beasts, oxen, horses and mules, and carts of all shapes and sizes, make the vicinity of Carrara the centre of an uproar that would be maddening if one had to live in it; but it is all very interesting to the stranger, and speaks more loudly than words of the importance of the great industry of the neighbourhood.
All around are great heaps—mountains almost—of broken, splintered marble; the débris merely of the great blocks which have, in times past, been quarried and sent to all quarters of the earth.
The quarries of Carrara have been worked ever since the Roman epoch, and the tufted hillsides round about have been burrowed to their bowels in taking out this untold wealth which, without exaggeration, has been as great as that of many mines of gold.