Marmor Lunense
About
Ships loaded at the nearby port of Luna carried this white and blue-grey marble to build the Pantheon, Trajan's Column, and dozens of other monuments across the capital. Large-scale quarrying began under Augustus and never really stopped for the next two centuries. More marble has come out of these Apuan Alps than any other quarry district on Earth.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
In ancient writing
- Strabo, Geography 5.2.5
The quarries above Luna, worked in blocks and slabs of white and blue-grey marble, loaded straight onto ships in the harbour below for Rome.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →