Marble, white and pristine, the ancient city of Rome is presented to us if we approach it through the Asterix comics, films such as Spartacus or Cleopatra or other more recent cultural phenomena, such as the video game Rome: Total War. But the truth is that this drawing of the city is a fiction.
Rome did not improve much either its layout or its aesthetics in the centuries in which it went from a town of warriors to the capital of a republic with imperial aspirations. Quite the contrary, Rome became a dark city, with cramped buildings, unhealthy and with a chromatic range very far from the snowy and polished surfaces with which we usually identify it.
However, transforming Rome into a brilliant city was not an idea foreign to the minds of the republican Romans. Figures like Cicero already raised the need for a facelift of the city, through marble, and Julius Caesar would establish the foundations to put that renovating project into motion, although, like so many of his other plans, it came to nothing when he was stabbed.
After that assassination that changed everything, the bulk marble was going to arrive in Rome from the hands of his heir, Augustus. It would be he who ended up boasting at the end of his days of “having found a city of brick and having transformed it into a city of marble,” as Suetonius records. And Augustus did not resort to just any marble, but he used the luxurious and still highly appreciated Carrara marble.
The Romans were well aware of the Carrara quarries, located in the north of the Italian peninsula. They called this marble “Lunense”, because the transport of the immense blocks taken from the mountain was carried out through the port of Luni. However, that marble was not the first to captivate the Romans. Its elites, perhaps attracted by the exotic, paid more attention to marbles originating from other parts of the Mediterranean.
While marble was a highly prized material in the eastern Mediterranean, the pragmatic Romans of the Republic did not flirt with it until the 2nd century BC. C., when the temple of Hercules Victor was erected in the Boarian forum. The date coincides with the period in which, defeated Carthage, Rome advanced in an expansion that took its borders to the east.
Throughout that century, the Romans fully penetrated Greek culture. The cities of the Greeks had a profound impact on the Roman imagination, and the republican elites began to appreciate the charm of marble.
That primitive use of marble in Rome was something exclusive to the elites. After all, it was a material whose extraction was expensive, and to this process we had to add the cost of transporting it to Rome. Marble therefore became a status symbol. Meanwhile, the nearby Carrara quarries were ignored.
But not for much longer. It belongs to a knight from Julius Caesar's time named Mamurra the honor of having gone down in history as the first to use Lunense in the city in a private capacity. According to legend – we have no solid evidence of Mamurra's existence or his construction efforts – the knight subjected his home to a comprehensive renovation, decorating its walls with Italic marble.
It seems that this pioneer caught the attention of his fellow citizens, amazed at how his domus had changed by covering the brick walls with that brilliant material, capable of competing with Greek marbles.
In favor of Carrara marble were its proximity and the ease of transportation through the port of Luni. After Mamurra, it would finally begin to be exploited with greater enjoyment, being used, for example, in the forum that Julius Caesar had built in the temple of Venus Genetrix.
Little by little, Carrara marble penetrated society, and Greek marbles, or marbles from other parts of the incipient empire, were displaced. Although its use did not disappear, since the colors of some of them would be used to combine them with the white of Carrara when Augustus made the national marble burst massively into public works.
As a good absolutist monarch, in his propaganda Augustus also resorted to the always helpful construction of large-scale public works, for which he recruited an army of architects whom he paid well. Especially if they came with some new idea.
He longed to differentiate himself from his predecessors, giving Rome the aesthetics of an imperial capital (even though he, being de facto emperor, was never named with this title). And the way that seemed most profitable to him was to dress the most important buildings with Carrara marble. He wanted to show, on the one hand, the pristine solidity of his government and, on the other, the idea that Rome was the political center of the Mediterranean, which no splendid Hellenic city could ever overshadow.
This is how the Carrara quarries stopped being almost anecdotal to become a fundamental piece of Augustan propaganda.
Another of Augustus' objectives was to build a new forum that would stand out within the city. What would become known as the Forum of Augustus is the first example of a square of this type in imperial times. Carrara marble was used abundantly in it, without excluding other African, Asian or Greek marbles. This gave a multicolored appearance to the complex, although white prevailed in buildings such as the temple of Mars Ultor or in the upper areas of the porticos.
That project became the greatest exponent of the reform of Rome, although not the only one. A huge number of works were undertaken at that time in the city, and many of them were covered with Carrara marble, such as the temple of Apollo erected on the Palatine Hill, the Basilica Emilia, the temple of Apollo Sosiano, that of the Dioscuri or that of Concord.
But perhaps the most striking display, and most akin to Augustan propaganda, was the Ara Pacis, a monumental altar in which the imperial family is portrayed with that Carrara marble that would always be associated with its members.
In those construction efforts, Augustus had the support of his lieutenant Marcus Vipsanio Agrippa, the same one who gave name to the famous Pantheon in which Carrara marble was also used in abundance. Agrippa was in charge of overseeing Augustus's urban projects, paying special attention to works of a utilitarian nature, such as aqueducts, sewers or the first of the especially well-equipped public baths.
A new way to please those lower classes on which the regime relied and who, on the other hand, also favored the number of jobs created in construction with Augusto's particular real estate bubble.
The fact that the man of the moment used Carrara marble profusely led private citizens to resort to that material in their works. A very striking case is that of Gaius Cestius, a Roman magistrate who ordered the construction of a pyramid about thirty-seven meters high as a mausoleum.
Carrara marble did not remain within the borders of the city of Rome, but soon spread throughout the emerging empire, having a special impact in Hispania, where some coastal cities, such as Barcino, Tarraco, Cartago Nova or Corduba, ended up also dressing in Carrara.
It seems that, although that marble was widely used in Hispania, it found its way mainly to the public spaces and monuments of coastal cities or, at most, to those located next to navigable rivers. Too much weight to move the Lunense on land.
After the death of Augustus, the Carrara quarries did not stop working. Tiberius, in fact, would convert the exploitations into imperial property, reserving the privilege of using the site. That decision did not imply that private initiative stopped extracting marble in Carrara, but rather that it continued to operate parallel to the emperor until the time of Trajan.
Of course, all of Augustus's successors always kept in mind that Carrara marble was already an imperial rock, an exponent of his power and divinity. Thus, over the years, constructions such as the forum of Nerva, the Domus Flavia, the temple of Vespasian and that of Venus Genetrix or the mausoleum of Hadrian would drink from Carrara, and Trajan or Marcus Aurelius would raise their famous columns in praise of their exploits using the precious Italic marble.
That trend suffered a turning point in the time of Domitian, when Carrara marble saw strong competition rise from the fashion dead. Greek white marbles regained levels of popularity not seen for more than a century, although, as attested by works after the fall of the Roman Empire, such as Michelangelo's David, Carrara would never die.
Augustus opened those quarries to the world and ensured that today this marble continues to be associated with the luxury, beauty and exclusivity that an absolute monarch granted it more than two thousand years ago.
