In our home town, Carrara, they say that the owners of the Betogli quarries, where there's the statuary marble, share one single progenitor: a quarryman born in the small town of Torano who received them as a gift in 1818 from his lover: the Duchess Maria Beatrice D'Este.
Maybe there's something true, since until some decades ago, most of the quarry owners in that place bore the same last name of our grandfather. What's sure is that our grandfather Aldo Vanelli, dubbed "Settecervelli" (seven brains), in the Sixties bought the quarry Zona Mossa in the field of Betogli; and close to that place in 2005 our family purchased the quarry called Poggio Silvestre.
You can see how the story of our quarries is also the story of our family, since when the marble was being brought down manually and bricks of green soap were gathered at home to be used for marble transportation, until the first mechanical digger or diamond wire were acquired, when the neglect of the helical... [Detail]