Italian marble can be found in buildings all over the world. In the Apuan Alps located in northern Tuscany, you can find the queries that produce more marble than anywhere on the planet. These queries produce four million tons of marble with a value of 1.1 billion dollars every year. The roads into the queries are very dangerous due to the fact that they are very small and curvy.
The process of retrieving the marble itself is a complicated one. To get a marble slab, the quarry worker drills three holes, one at the top, and two holes that are horizontal to each other at the bottom. All three holes come together in the middle. A wire is fed into a hole and spun very quickly with water being used as a lubricant. This is done until the marble slab is detached from the mountain. The wire is also useful for shaping the slab after the fact. An alternative to the wire is a large chainsaw which is used to cut right through the mountain. At the end of the process, the marble blocks are very heavy and large machines are required to carry them away from the mountain.
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