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CARRARA |
  
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| Over the centuries, talented artists like Michelangelo and Bernini, Giambologna and Canova, writers and poets like Dickens and Tolstoj, D'Annunzio and Pirandello, have mingled with the crowds of curious travellers who have come up the valleyr of Colonnata, Fantiscritti and Torano to discover the "land of the gigants", see the great blocks breaking away from the mountain, meet the men who have provided cities in many parts of the world with the material which, more than any other, incarnates the solemnity and holiness of their monuments. In Carrara itself, before the entrance to the valleys, there are great workshops, places where the untreated marble i processed, cut, rough-hewn and carved; these are the heirs of the workshops where some of the finest works of art ever produced by man were made. The places where, for centuries, whole dynasties of sculptors, with names like Baratta and Finelli, Fontana and Triscornia, made statues and monuments for the great courts of Europe, for squares and churches, palaces and gardens, in many towns and countries. Though still active, these workshops can be visited, as can the institute where these artists traditionally trained, the Academy of Fine Arts, housed in what was once the residence of the Marquis of Carrara. Here there is a rich gallery of plaster casts, a picture gallery and, of course, a large collection of marble works. Here we need only look around us to realize to indissoluble link between the town and the material that has conditioned its destiny, defined its cultural identity, from the Romanesque Cathedral made entirely of local stone, to the Marble Museum and the extraordinary paving of Piazza Alberica, one of the most elegant examples of eighteenth-century urban design. The particular features of its identity distinguish Carrara from the rest of the territory, even from Massa which is only a stone's throw away and to which Carrara has been indissolubly linked, since the second half of the fifteenth-century from the point of view of administration and political questions.
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