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It was a day like no other.
The toilets were golden, the guests were chartered in on private jets, and the flowers were stacked so high that only a sliver of sun peeked through. And the marble — the marble was flawless.
A post shared by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian)
Kanye West married Kim Kardashian on May 24, 2014, but that wasn’t the only love story on display that day. It was also the most public proclamation West had yet made of his love for marble.
Intricately carved, cut and crafted, the Kardashian-West wedding reportedly featured a custom marble piano, a bespoke marble table, and 10 nude black-marble statues (though 30 were created). All of these masterpieces were created from blocks mined in the Carrara quarries in Carrara, Italy.
That wasn’t the first time marble would find itself buried in a West-related headline, and it surely won’t be the last.
Aside from the couple’s extravagant wedding details, West reportedly demanded a marble floor for his Feb. 13 “Saturday Night Live” performance, saying, “If I’m going to sing like a stone, I need to feel the stone.” He used it as a parable for his ego in an interview with the New York Times’ T Magazine in April 2015. He called out Page Six for not talking more about the marble tables in their Kimye wedding coverage. And the beloved marble even sparked a fight between Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner on a January 2015 episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”: Jenner allegedly helped herself to a few slabs from the Kardashian-West stash and Kim wasn’t able to finish decorating Kanye’s bathroom.
The unlikely duo has had their share of ups and downs, but their love has persisted. On March 13, West tweeted, “I believe in us.” (It probably wasn’t about marble, but who knows?)
So who, or what, is this mystifying building material that charmed its way into West’s heart?
Here’s everything you need to know.
Individually, the power couple of West and Carrara each boasts an impressive list of accomplishments — but while West continues to expand his empire, Carrara’s legacy has been centuries in the making.
‘The city [of Carrara] lives on marble and its citizens breathe its dust.’
“Seen from the distance, the vast panorama of mountain peaks appears picturesque. A remote and inaccessible landscape of towering stone,” Dr. Alison Leitch, a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who spent 25 years doing ethnographic research in Carrara, wrote in her thesis, “Materiality of Marble.” “Yet from close up a much more worked-on, human and mundane world is revealed.”
Tucked into foothills of the Apuan Alps, Carrara sits at the tip of Italy’s Tuscany region, about 62 miles northwest of Florence. Mining of the Carrara quarries began more than 2,000 years ago, when slaves used chisels and wooden tools to chop off pieces of the block.
The approximately 64,000 inhabitants of the region are passionate about their relation to one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.
“The city lives on marble and its citizens breathe its dust,” Leitch wrote in her thesis. She noted that the people of Carrara believe the calcium carbonate in marble “cleans and purifies the lungs.”
One hundred sixty-four quarries are mined throughout the mountains, generating dozens upon dozens of different kinds of marble, distinguished from one another by their color and veining. Statuario marble, for which Carrara is most revered, forms from pure limestone. Darker varieties tend to have impurities, such as clay, that mix in during metamorphism. Calacatta is one of the rarest kinds, and is identified by its thicker veins.
As West stated in a succession of tweets on March 13, “I care about people.” “I care about truth.” “I care about quality.”
I have discovered my single greatest quality. I care.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) March 13, 2016
While there are hundreds of marble mines across the globe (from China to India to Vermont), Carrara has produced not only the most marble in the world, but the most sought-after slabs. The city is also the capital for stonecutting, where marble is shipped in to be worked on by craftsmen learned in centuries of tradition.
In 2006, NASA released an image of Carrara and the surrounding region, taken during the summer of 2001 by their Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus. What appears to be snow-capped mountains is actually white marble.
Lovers who hail from tumultuous pasts make any great love story even greater. West’s story is familiar: grew up in Chicago, dropped out of college, and proved all the haters wrong when he became one of the greatest recording artists of the 21st century. Carrara has a much more chaotic past.
“There is a very long history of anarchism in Carrara,” Leitch told The Post in an email.
Anarchism flooded Carrara and the surrounding area in the 19th century. Belgian and Swiss revolutionaries, who’d been expelled from their respective countries, founded Italy’s first anarchist group in nearby Avenza in 1885.
“What I care about is history,” West said on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in February 2014.
In January 1894, a state of emergency was declared by then-Italian minister Francesco Crispi, during what would become known as the Lunigiana revolt.
“The rising … was not due to the economic conditions prevailing,” read a New York Times article, published January 16th, 1894. “But rather had its origin in hatred of the principle of authority.”
Quarry workers received fair wages, but the days were long and the labor of mining so arduous that overseers had to accept any willing (and able-bodied) applicant — many were ex-convicts and criminals on the run. Another New York Times article from January 18, 1894, referred to the quarry workers as “the most abandoned lot of laborers in Italy.”
“You have to know that you are somebody,” West said during an October 2015 interview with Lou Stoppard for SHOWstudio.
The revolt ended, and hundreds were arrested and tried, but the radical spirit of Carrara remained. Quarrymen went on strike in the summer of 1911 and achieved improved working conditions, including a 6½-hour work day, which Leitch descried as “pretty amazing.” In 1968, the International of Anarchist Federations was founded in Carrara, Italy.
Carrara marble has had many, many love affairs — West is hardly the first to be enamored with it. From artisans to architects to authors, the creamy, white stone has inspired droves of artists.
“Like Muslims go to Mecca and Christians go to the Vatican, sculptors must come to Carrara,” art curator Giuliano Gori told the New York Times in an August 2002 article.
The Pantheon, London’s Marble Arch, the Oslo Opera House, the Peace Monument in Washington, DC, Damien Hirst’s “Anatomy of an Angel,” Rome’s Trajan’s Column, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, the interior of the Freedom Tower — all created with marble from Carrara. Even Dante Alighieri cited Carrara in “Inferno,” the first part of his epic poem “Divine Comedy.”
“I mean taste, culture, art, just the quality in life,” West said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in 2013.
Even Osama bin Laden’s family wanted a piece of the historic quarries.
The Saudi Binladin Group, the third-largest construction company in the world, which was founded by bin Laden’s father in 1931 (Osama was disowned by his family in 1994 and expelled from all company proceedings), purchased a company that owned a third of the Carrara quarries in August 2014.
But one of Carrara’s most notable affairs was with Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, aka Michelangelo, who was 26 years old when he created his most famed sculpture, David, out of Carrara marble.
“This is the type of impact I wanna make on the Earth,” West — who has compared himself to Michelangelo at least half a dozen times — also said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Michelangelo once said, “I see the angel in the marble and set it free.” He carved David out of a block from Carrara that he inherited in 1501. The block had been sitting in Florence for a few decades, after several sculptors failed to envision its angel.
“People could want so many things out of you and you don’t want to let people down because of Michelangelo comments and things,” West told SHOWstudio. “You want to deliver genius.”
Today, Carrara is busy reinventing its image to adapt to the technological age, while preserving its storied traditions.
“We want to innovate and we will win someday,” West tweeted in February 2015.
We want to innovate and we will win someday.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 20, 2015
Marble is an extremely difficult material to work with, and artists have largely turned away from it in the last couple centuries. Though demand for Carrara marble has actually increased more than 30 percent since 2009 (for which West is given some credit), blocks are mostly cut into slabs and used in home design.
But Gualtiero Vanelli, an entrepreneur who (along with artist and longtime West collaborator Vanessa Beecroft) designed the pieces for West’s wedding, is trying to reignite an era of marble innovation.
“What I see at the quarry are millions of ideas,” Vanelli told the New York Times in December 2015.
After inheriting his family’s three-generation-spanning marble business in 2001, Vanelli worked with robotics companies — and, more recently, 3-D technology — to research and develop machinery that helps turn blocks of marble into works of art.
“Technology and robots create the shapes of the sculpture,” a Robot City representative wrote in an email, “but craftsmen’s hands, inherited from tradition, gives them life.”
For the couple that has all the makings of a modern-day love story — money, fame, reinvention, passion — there is no limit to how high their love can soar.
And as West once sang in “Stronger”: “Damn, they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
Representatives for West did not return requests for comment.
Shut the fuck up and enjoy the greatness.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016