Carrarese Calcio 1908

Carrarese – meaning from or of the Italian town of Carrara.

Calcio meaning football/soccer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you one of my new favourite teams. The Marbles of Italy’s Serie B.

Carrara is on the Italian west coast, tucked up near the top end. Upper thigh – if Italy really does resemble a leg booting a football. It is a small town of monumental significance to Italian history.

Why?

Because it provided all their marble.

From Ancient Rome to Renaissance Florence, the whole place, for more than 2,000 years, has been clad in Carrara marble.

Let’s go even further back, something like 200 million years. Give or take a week or so. The region was once a great tropical sea – tiny sea creatures, coral and shells settled at the bottom of the seabed. Over the millennia, they were crushed down into layers of sedimentary rock – limestone, to be precise. Later, the African plate moved north and pushed into Europe, forcing this limestone first deeper underground where, under extreme pressure and heat, the limestone recrystallised into marble. Then, fortunately, the African plates continued pushing and eventually ‘crumpled’, for want of a better term, the land upwards – forming the Alps mountain range and pushing this precious marble closer to the surface and above it.

And then along comes man. Digging around in the dirt, they realise this stuff is a) really

good looking and b) really strong and durable… we could make some money out of this.

So the town is perfectly placed, close to the sea so the heavy marble can be carted down to ships which can then head along the coast to supply the growing Italian cities of the Roman Empire, but also close enough to the foothills of the Apuan Alps that it can dig down (or in some cases up) to get to the marvellous marble.

Carrara marble is famous for its high quality – white or blue-grey in colour and perfect for building and sculpting (and last season's away kit paid homage to it - see below).

A little bit like the Spice in Dune then, but not quite so much. He who controlled the marble controlled the… palaces.

The Romans perfected the industry, with hundreds of quarries being opened in the region and heavy-duty carts being built to facilitate the movement of the freshly cut stone. And this, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the fascinating crest of Carrarese Calcio 1908 and allows us to finally #GetTheBadgeIn.

See, the motto of the town is "Fortitudo mea in rota" ("My strength is in the wheel") and the town coat of arms carries… a wheel. The sort of strong wheel needed to bring the marble down from the mountain to the waiting ships. And this is why I love it so much. Simple, effective, deeply rooted in the local history and culture…

I love that all the beautiful architecture of Imperial Rome and Renaissance Italy began here – in the mountains, in the dust, with the back-breaking work of hacking away at the Alps and carting it down to the coast. This is the real engine room of all those marvels – the men and women behind the scenes, sleeves rolled up, who made it all happen.

After the Romans, the region was long ruled together by two Italian noble families who grew rich from the trade. The Malaspina family (which means ‘bad thorn’ – and there are lots of theories as to why) and the Cybo family from nearby Genoa, who supplemented their trading profits from this great port town with the extraction of marble. Together they formed an ‘Office of Marble’ in 1564 – a sort of OPEC for stone.

Famous buildings made from the marble include the nearby Basilica of Massa but also, probably of most importance, Michelangelo’s David, which sits in Florence. Michelangelo created David from a piece of marble that had twice been discarded by other sculptors. Agostino di Duccio gave up on a project using the block, after which it sat untouched for 10 years. At that point, Antonio Rossellino took a crack at the block but decided it was too much of a pain to work with. When Michelangelo finally got his hands on it, the marble had been waiting for 40 years for someone who was up to its challenge.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the quarry workers of Carrara added another interesting chapter to their history by embracing political anarchy. According to a New York Times article from 1894, the workers in Carrara’s marble quarries were considered some of the most neglected labourers in Italy. Many were former convicts or men escaping the law, and the work was so brutal and dangerous that quarry owners were willing to employ almost anyone strong enough to endure it, regardless of their past.

Over time, the quarry workers and stone carvers developed a reputation for radical political beliefs. Anarchism became deeply connected to Carrara’s identity, especially after revolutionaries expelled from Belgium and Switzerland arrived in 1885 and established Italy’s first anarchist group there. The quarry district soon gained a reputation as the birthplace of Italian anarchism. One local anarchist, Galileo Palla, famously claimed that in Carrara “even the stones are anarchists.”

In 1894, the marble workers took to the streets in protest – and armed themselves for a fight. 40,000 government soldiers had to be sent to put down the “Lunigiana revolt”. The workers blocked the roads into the town with huge blocks of marble - a gesture I absolutely love. However, I, for one, would not have wished to have been one of those sent to confront these angry quarry workers with their tools, weapons, sketchy backgrounds and pointy slabs of marble.

This is why I love this badge and this story. The most beautiful and elegant pieces of art and architecture in all of man’s history began here – dug out by the hands of hardy men doing a hardy job and receiving little acknowledgement for their efforts.

Carrarese Calcio 1908 - playing today at Stadio dei Marmi (Stadium of the Marbles) - carry an incredible heritage with them on to the pitch.

Carrara’s strength really is in the wheel.