Natural stone, and especially marble, are the top choices of materials in design, art, and architecture.
Always unique, available in many variants, and resistant (both to external agents and overtime), they are used to create many projects and objects all over the world. When it comes to marble, we often hear it said that the Italian one is among the bests: but how did it earn this fame? Here’s what to know about it!
Why Italian marble is considered among the best in the world
Several reasons have led Italian marble to be considered among the bests in the world.
From the historical point of view, marble was the most widely used material by Renaissance artists: sculptors like Michelangelo and Donatello for example, gave life to masterpieces of eternal beauty with Calacatta marble or the Statuary. Even in the rest of the world, and over the centuries, Italian marble has been widely used in the making of works of art, design, and architecture.
Italians have always been considered masters of marble extraction and processing, and even nowadays, training courses are held in Carrara for anyone who wants to learn more about it. Plus, some types of marble, such as the Carrara one, are extracted only in precise areas of the Italian territory, and that increases their value. Italian marble is then synonymous with luxury, purity, and elegance, and is seen as a “status symbol” for the coating of interiors in residences, hotels, and boutiques all over the world.
The combination of this material with the idea of “luxury” is not causal but is due to the premium quality of Italian marble and its refinement, which makes it extremely prestigious. If you plan to invest in Italian marble, therefore, you are about to make a long-term investment.
Don’t worry, there’s no danger of getting tired of it.
The most famous Italian marbles
The types of marble are different for color, veins, and finishes, and these features change according to the area where a block comes from. Here are the most famous and appreciated Italian variants:
- Calacatta marble: it comes from the mountains around Carrara, as well as Versilia and Garfagnana. It is a fine-grained marble, with a bright white background and more or less marked veins ranging from gray to black. It is widely used to coat interior floors and walls and for bathroom furnishings. The Gold variant is also very famous.
- Carrara marble: the most famous type, with a “dirty” white background, and light gray veins. This finds wide use in interior design as well as, as history teaches, in sculpture.
- Travertine marble: it has been extracted since Etruscan civilization in Tuscany and Lazio (not by chance, it was used by the Romans to make, for example, the Colosseum). Very famous also in construction, it has many shades ranging from white to walnut, from yellow to red, and that is why it is used both for classic and creative purposes.
- Red Verona Marble: considered the best red marble, it is extracted in the area of Verona and is characterized by a deep red color, with nodules of an ellipsoidal shape in beige or ivory. It is used for floors, stairs, coatings, especially for interiors, but also columns, fireplaces, and sculptures.
The most famous countries when it comes to marble
Italy is one of the countries that export the majority of marble in the world, and it is everywhere considered of the highest quality. Then we find Turkey, where there are numerous Travertine marble quarries, Greece, from which variants such as Volakas and Thassos are extracted, Iran, where we find the precious Grey Gohara marble and several colorful variants, such as onyx, and Spain, famous for the Emperador marble and Brazil, home of unique pink and green marbles.
Source: www.marmomac.com