An article, “Come Back, Michelangelo, the Marble Needs You,” was published in the New York Times on August 28, 2002. It pointed out that, whereas there are still vast amounts of marble in the mountains above Carrara and local artisans and residents are very fond of it, the city is almost as well known for its lard, a Tuscan delicacy made from pig fat that is salted, spiced and aged.

“When contemporary art came in, it basically blew marble off the map,” said Francesca Bernardini, a local sculptor who still insists on using it. In an attempt to counter this trend, local officials have spent the last five years trying to persuade contemporary sculptors to give Carrara marble a try.  Giuliano Gori, an art curator and collector from Pistoria, near Florence, has become something of a patron of Carrara, and he says, “Like Muslims go to Mecca and Christians go to the Vatican, sculptors must come to Carrara.”

In July, Carrara formally opened a permanent outdoor sculpture exhibit to display new works, which it hopes will signal a renaissance for marble. An American sculptor, Sol LeWitt, drew up plans for an S-shaped wall – called “Curved Wall” – and requested that the marble for its construction be as indistinguishable as possible from concrete, his preferred medium. “As long as they were fairly anonymous blocks of stone, it was O.K. with me,” he said because, “nouveau rich houses always have a lot of marble in them.”

Today, 90 different companies mine 80 active quarries above Carrara. Most of the marble is used by builders for exterior and interior flourishes. But Carlo Musetti, a geologist who works in the quarries, points out that other mountains have marble, too, and if China or India began developing quarries, the cheaper labor there might mean that they could undercut Carrara’s world markets.

So Carrara is turning to its past to forge its future, in which artists and tourists flock to Carrara because marble once