Marbleland is a scathing theatrical monologue, with original music, dedicated to the theme of the exploitation of the Apuan Alps. A colorful fresco of different voices, as many as the professions and figures of the world of the Carrara quarries, of yesterday and today. The show is born from a year of research and 80 hours of interviews with marble workers and people who have always lived and breathed it. The result is a text of denunciation in the tradition of civil and investigative theater. A passionate and ironic monologue that gives voice to quarrymen, entrepreneurs, sculptors, truck drivers, environmentalists and inhabitants of a harsh and contradictory land. Following the thread of history in search of white gold, a material that was once believed to be inexhaustible, Marbleland tells of what has been defined as “the greatest environmental disaster in Europe”: the environmental and social damage, the lack of safety at work and the enrichment of a few to the detriment of the community. A third world economy in the heart of the Belpaese. The story of a city that could have streets paved with gold and instead is one of the most indebted municipalities in Italy.
“Marbleland, welcome to the heart of the oldest industrial area in the world, where the landscape changes even when you stand still. Imagine a four-lane highway from Florence to Stockholm. Imagine it paved with white marble: that’s the amount of material excavated every year from the Apuan Alps. Now think, 80% of it is reduced to dust: calcium carbonate.
What to do with it? Anything.
Omnipresent, white, pure, it comes from the mountain just as it is.
In fact, it is the mountain, ours.
Marbleland, how to transform a unique resource in the world into a mountain of dust: instructions for use.”
