The Majestic Marble Quarries of Northern Italybr Countless generations of tiny creatures lived, diedbr and drifted slowly to the bottom of a primordial sea, where their bodies were slowly compressed by gravity, layer upon layer upon layer, tighter and tighter, until eventually they all congealed and petrified into the interlocking white crystals we know as marble.br These quarries are far off of Italy’s most-traveled tourist routes, so few visitors see them; most of us know Italian marble mainly as an endpoint in the chain of consumption — not only Renaissance statues in major museumsbr but also tombstones, bookends and kitchen countertops in American McMansions.br By LUCA LOCATELLI and SAM ANDERSONJULY 26, 2017br The story of Italian marble is the story of difficult motion: violent, geological, haunted by failurebr and ruin and lost fortunes, marred by severed fingers, crushed dreams, crushed men.br Over the centuries, the strange geology of the marble mountains has produced an equally strangebr human community — strange even by the standards of Italy’s fractious regional subcultures.br This was the final stage of an epic saga that, from mountain to piazza, actually began before Michelangelo’s birthbr and involved primitive and custom-engineered machinery and, above all, great sweating armies of groaning, straining men.br Michelangelo sculpted most of his statues from this stone, and he was so obsessed with the regionbr that he used to fantasize about carving an entire white mountain right where it stood.