Carrara beyond the sea, a discovery you don't expect

When you think of Carrara, two things probably come to mind: the beaches of Versilia and the white marble from the quarries. In reality, it is a city that in recent years has reinvented itself as one of the most interesting cultural destinations in Tuscany. The city of marble that everyone knows has become an open-air cultural laboratory where tradition and modernity meet to create something completely new. Here, every project is born from the collaboration between international designers and local craftsmen, everything takes shape from the large historic quarries to the small family artisan workshops.

Until September 28, 2025, the historic center of Carrara is experiencing an extraordinary transformation thanks to White Carrara, an international design festival now in its ninth edition, a “widespread creative laboratory” that transforms every corner of the center into a surprise. During the festival, the city becomes an open-air museum where art mixes with everyday life. The theme is “Design Here and Now” and it means something simple but brilliant: the most beautiful marble in the world worked by the best designers in the world, to create objects that speak of today. You can meet: none other than Karim Rashid, the designer who has designed 4,000 everyday objects, Ross Lovegrove, the Englishman famous for creating objects that seem like creatures from an alien (but beautiful) world, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the French architect who has the magic touch of elegance. There are also young talents like Kickie Chudikova who from Bratislava via New York experiments with the future of design, and above all the Italian masters: Elena Salmistraro, Giulio Iacchetti (two Compasso d'Oro!), Massimo Giacon who has designed for Alessi.

CARMI, the Museum dedicated to Carrara and Michelangelo, hosts “Per forza di levare” until October, a fascinating exhibition with eighty historical photographs from the Alinari Archives. Here, the great photographers of the nineteenth century demonstrate how to photograph the three-dimensionality of marble sculptures. Visual Arts and Experimentation at mudaC │Carrara art museum, which hosts Vincenzo Marsiglia’s exhibition “Stars and Dust,” exploring the frontiers of mixed reality and artificial intelligence in contemporary art. In the project room, Gianluca Sgherri exhibits “Uninverso,” an installation that deconstructs spatial perceptions through a dynamic and immersive labyrinth.

Carrara is discovered slowly, stopping to talk to the artisans in their workshops, entering the improvised galleries, attending live demonstrations of how a design object is born from a block of rough marble. The beauty of Carrara during White Carrara is that you only need to walk through the historic center to continually come across installations, open workshops, meetings with artists. It's like a treasure hunt where every street hides a surprise. It's always nice to combine a visit to the festival with a trip to the marble quarries (always spectacular) and maybe a day at the beach.