La Piazzetta

Appears in

#25Honey from a Weed
Honey from a Weed

By Patience Gray

Published 1986

  • About

Carrara, a little industrial town hemmed in by the Apuanian Alps, once mistaken by Lady Blessington for an ‘earthly paradise’ as she looked down at it from the summit of la Foce, while the coachman eased the horses, was, when we lived there, still small enough to be invaded in the month of May by the honey smell of acacia flowers, drifting down from wooded hills.

The mountains streaked with white morraines, when seen at a distance and in the sun, glitter like cascades. Marble is dynamited or sawn from the mountain face and sliced by elicoidal wires out of the crests. The white cascades are the crushed surplus which served as ‘slides’ down which the blocks of marble were perilously run on wooden rollers. They now form the uneasy bed of hairpin access roads.