Reading the White Stone

This title provides a combination of Tuscan travel and the micro-biography of one of the world's most fascinating stones.

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When David Macfarlane's sculptor friend first invited him to visit the Carrara mountain region of Tuscany he leapt at the chance. Quickly seduced by the people, the art, the wine and the landscape, this community of artists and marble workers became to the writer 'an endless opera of loves and jealousies, triumphs and failures'. But it was the thriving industry of marble, this microcosm of human life, that absolutely intrigued him: how experts learn to detect flaws in the stone before cutting into it, how the world-famous Tuscan stone is cut, shipped and put to use for everything from an opera auditorium to a Beverly Hills bidet. The locals recall the day that Henry Moore came to choose a stone, sending the town into chattery excitement, they display photos of the giant trucks that arrived in the sleepy, dusty towns to ship away the walls for the Lincoln centre, and they tell how Michelangelo chose his stone...Fascinating in its own right, READING THE WHITE STONE opens up a community to inspection, where marble becomes a way into the lives of people and the history of a place.