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As production increased, quarrymen had to find a way to transport these massive blocks down the mountain to warehouses, workshops, and ultimately to ports for shipment.
At first, they rolled the blocks down the quarry; the blocks would land with a thunder that echoed throughout the valley. In the process, however, 85 percent of the marble turned to rubble. (Eventually, as the accumulating rubble decreased the slope, the blocks could no longer be rolled; the quarry had to be abandoned and a new one started at higher ground.) The surviving marble blocks were loaded onto carts and transported to workshops or the port by oxen.
In 1820, Italian historian Emanuele Repetti wrote, "Not excessively large blocks were loaded onto carts with small, solid wheels and hauled by numerous oxen." He also pointed out an improvement in the transport system: "When the blocks were too big, many more oxen were used and the cart was substituted by a sled." The blocks literally skidded down the slope on sleds, whose speed was checked by specialized quarrymen who slowed down the sleds by pulling onto ropes tied to it.
The English novelist Charles Dickens, visiting the area twenty-five years later, likened the marble's journey to "a stream meandering down to the bottom of the valley over a bed of stones of all forms and sizes . . . rudimentary carts of five-hundred years ago or so are still in use. Two, four, ten, twenty pairs of oxen per block, depending on size, are used." The oxen remained in service until 1929.
Another Briton, Thomas Robson, opened a shop in Carrara in 1816 and made substantial contributions to the development of the marble trade. Robson was married to the daughter of Count Lazzoni, the wealthy owner of many quarries. William Walton, also British, soon realized that it was easier for foreigners to invest in transport and trade rather than quarrying.
Walton first built roads, then in 1854 began laying down railroads. By 1910, 80 percent of marble extracted in Carrara was traveling by railway. Until 1966, sleds were commonly used to transport marble loads weighing twenty-five to thirty tons down extremely steep slopes. (Today, the tradition is kept alive by a sled transport exhibition once a year during Ferragosto, the mid-August public holiday.)
Like the sleds, the railroads reached the end of the line in 1964; the entire railroad network has now been dismantled. Trucking has proved to be much more effective.
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