Mountains of marble

What a day, we started on the road a lot later than the last few days.  Katie did remind me when on holidays a sleep in is a good thing too, she was right.

View from the lounge window

Firstly I would like to mention our accommodation, (this is not a paid advertisement) we are staying on the hill top at Villa Ducci and it is fantastic. Our room contains all we require, and at first we were unsure as it didn't have Air Conditioning. But with the high ceilings, tiled floors and massive windows there is no over heating issues. The walls are about 1 foot thick and keep the heat out, and when the windows are open the Italian shutters allow the breeze to flow through without the beaming sunshine. Another thing there is no flies or mosquitoes so no fly screens are needed.

Lounge

Dining Room

Our room

View from the terrace - where we have breakfast.

The host Giocomo is great, so far he has been a wealth of information on the area and has been great to converse with in English on just about every topic.  He is local to the area too, and this helps as he know where to and where not to go.

Giocomo is also one of the other reasons why we were on the road later this morning.  As Katie and I are the only guests here at the moment we had Giocomo all to our selves for conversation after breakfast.  We were given the opportunity to learn more of this region and Giocomo also showed much interest in our lives in Australia.

He also assisted in planning out our travel plans for the day which consisted of marble beach resorts and finishing with a postcard town.

We started the day by heading to the Carara Marble area, this is where so much marble in Italy has come from. In the past trips we have admired many buildings and sculptures that has been created from this very stone. When planning the trip this time I wanted to see where it had come from.

From the distance the mountains look like they have snow on them, but it is in fact the white marble. It took a while of twists and turns to get our way to the top, this was a working mine area, that had also mad a little room for us tourists to see the 'white gold'.

We took a look around the interesting museum and then went inside.

 

For 10 euro each we had a 40 min tour inside the mountain. We caught a bus that took us 600 meters into the mountain, and we were in the marble caves.  The caves we were in were 400 meters below the mountain surface and had a height inside of over 25 meters. The air was very cool and also humid the guide took us through the processes used for the extraction of the stone.

 

 

Next we headed down the mountain and took a drive along the Italian Riveria passing mansions and hotel after hotel. Now the different thing in Italy is most beaches are private, the hotels are on one side then the road on the beach side is the hotels beach, with its own bar, pool, deck chairs and umbrellas. So as we drove along there was practically no way to see the beach.

For the evening we made our way to Lerici a postcard town that rivals the Cinque terre. We didn't do anything there other than take a walk, enjoy a drink (spritz and a beer) take many photos, have dinner and gelato.

This evening the weather has changed, for the first time the wind has picked up and as writing I have seen lightning in the sky over the city of La Spezia.

Todays video at Carrara

Tomorrow, let's see where the wind takes us.