Carrara marble is one of the most prestigious marbles in the world.A slab can cost up to 400 dollars (approximately 8 thousand pesos) per square meter and, throughout history, has been used for some notable buildings.Think of the Pantheon in Rome or Michelagelo's iconic statue of David.Interior of the pantheon in Rome (Image: Special)The luxury stone comes from the Apuan Alps, a mountain range in northern Tuscany that stretches 58 kilometers and reaches 2,000 meters in height.Marble has been carved in Italy since Roman antiquity, and due to its thousand-year history, Carrara's quarries have produced more marble than anywhere else on Earth.The market as a whole is worth more than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) and produces 4 million tons of marble each year, with 13,000 people involved.The quarries were even featured in a James Bond movie, with Daniel Craig driving an Aston Martin DBS down the marble slopes.We visited two quarries: Cava Querciola, number 147, and Cava Fiordichiara, number 76, which is a cave inside a mountain.The extraction of marble in Carrara is carried out with a 5-millimeter diamond wire or with large chainsaws.Depending on how they are mined and their veins, some marbles will be more expensive than others.For example, a slab of Statuario or Calacatta marble can cost more than $11,000 per ton.The most expensive is usually the type of marble that is exported.Last year, 1.2 million tons of blocks crossed the Italian border to China, the United States and Germany as the top 3.The marble that remains goes to local businesses and artisan workshops, which are spread throughout the coastal towns of western Tuscany.The city of Pietrasanta stands out, or “the city of marble” named for its continuous flow of artists.Unlike foreign companies looking for the most luxurious slab, the artisans in Pietrasanta are searching for the perfect stone to bring to life, as Michelangelo used to say."When you make a sculpture, some materials can come off, whereas this one is quite homogeneous," master sculptor Franco Cervietti told Business Insider.Cervietti's workshop sculpts around 200 tons of marble each year.The Carrara quarries (Image: Special)“We say that some materials have a 'side' because on the one hand they work very well, while on the other hand they are very hard.Therefore, they are difficult to mold and model.Instead, Carrara marble has all those characteristics.So it's a pretty even white.It has a medium hardness.It is not too hard and not too soft.It's really perfect,” he assures.