 Return to the HomelandMarble Workers in Versilia
In 1929, Lorenzo Viani, an artist and writer in Viareggio, published Ritorno alla Patria (Return to the Homeland), an autobiographical novel. The following year it was ranked equal first with Anselmo Bucci's Il pittore volante (The Flying Painter) in the Viareggio Book Prize, ushering in the era of the great literary awards in Italy. In the book, published by Alpes (Milan), the author's incisive phrasing and poignant style evoke, in passages of incomparable beauty, the rugged charm of the landscape and life in the Apuan Alps among the marble quarries and the labors of the quarry workers. "...Above the arc of the Magra appeared the bare summits of the Alps. The mountainsides crumbled into Cyclopean splinters on the river bank. The shaggy ridge of Mount Tambura stood out beyond, amid a cluster of quarries, with the roar of a river in full spate, crashing against the sharp crags. The Highest, on the orders of the smaller mountains, rose above like a great cathedral of blue stones. The Gabberi was a thunderous cloud sailing above the Pian di Versilia and veiling it. The mountainsides jutted out, seeming to be rearing up by contrast above the impetuous bastion of the stony massif, the blasting of the marble, the rubble, the crevices in the quarries, their shady hollows. The castles, like the teeth of titans decayed by the centuries, housed in their cavities swarms of birds who rummaged in their crevices, built their nests in the cavities and flew with elation over the debris of the walls..."
"...The rough men of the mountains, the quarrymen hewing the quarry walls, the men with their feet covered with stone dust flailed through rubble-filled ravines, their limbs heavy as marble statuary, with chipped faces, their foreheads like rugged cliff tops, eyes as hard as river flints, mustaches withered like the convolvulus clinging to the rocks and eyelashes open like the eagle rising, startling the wayfarer. The tracks were pounded by the steady tread of this silent army assailing the mountain. Black cliffs, the grim peaks of mysterious cathedrals on whose summit black crosses rose crookedly, loomed up against gigantic mountains hacked open, from whose stony bowels the rubble cascaded with the roar of a cataclysm. In those stony mountainsides men were annihilated like moles amid the shattered splinters. They hung in bunches clinging to a rope, and gave a blasting spike the feet and voice of steel. Men and oxen, cooled by the bristling shadows made their way down to the valleys, and peasants rode goading their cattle on with prods, their bellowing resounding in the cloisters..."
Decio G. R. Carugati
VIDEO CONTENT
|
|
.jpg)
