Carving tale from mountain of stone Journalist explores artist’s inspiration

Eric Scigliano traveled to Carrara, Italy, to study the world-famous marble quarries there. He listened on site as the older workers told their tales. He scaled the mountains of white stone and imagined Michelangelo picking out blocks of rock. Eventually, he did what almost every visitor to Carrara ends up doing. He considered renting space in a sculpture shop.

“I started to feel like one of the old guys,” said Scigliano, who spent seven months in Carrara working on his newly released book “Michelangelo’s Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara.”

“I was tempted all the time,” he said. “I actually resisted setting up in a sculpture shop. I was afraid if I did, I’d never write the book.”

Apparently Carrara, like Maine, has a mystique about it. In Maine, artists explain the appeal as “something about the light.” In Carrara, said Scigliano, who will read from his book at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, at the Rockland Public Library, it’s “something about the rock.”

For Scigliano, the little town just south of Genoa became rich material for a book that not only spans generations of quarrymen, artists, popes and patrons, but also Scigliano’s own ancestors who were cavatori, or quarry workers. Like the Italian cavatori who left Italy and worked the granite quarries on Deer Isle in the 19th century, the cavatori in Scigliano’s story are hardy men with muscles of steel and hearts of gold. Indeed, in their doggedness, they reminded the writer of Mainers he has met during more than two decades of visiting his parents, who live in St. George.

“The old guys I know in Maine are lobstermen. Among them and among the loggers in the Pacific Northwest and the Alaska fishermen are people who work face to face with powerful, unpredictable, dangerous, obdurate natural forces,” said Scigliano, who lives in Seattle. “It takes a certain kind of spirit and it builds a certain kind of spirit as well. You do live intensely because you’re aware you could be killed tomorrow. For the cavatori, it also means drinking prodigious quantities of wine and singing opera.”

Indeed, at times when Scigliano spoke about Carrara, he could have just as easily been describing Stonington and its unique landscape: “I knew Carrara was something I wanted to write about, the impression of the mountain and of the work and the sense of time, the sense that you’re living in several times at once. It’s so inter-layered. And the old stories are still present.”

Although many of the contemporary cavatori in Carrara tell stories about their travels to quarries in Barre, Vt., which they call “little Carrara,” they also spoke of Maine and its quarrying history. Scigliano’s own stories about his encounters with quarrymen and sculptors, with his Massachusetts-based Italian relatives and his own musings on poetry and folk tales unfold like a novel. While many unexpected figures – among them Dante Alighieri, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci and Maine writer Mary McCarthy – show up or are quoted in Scigliano’s narrative, Michelangelo, of course, is the lead character.

“My interest first was in Carrara, the people, the quarries, the story, the history,” said Scigliano, an award-winning journalist. “I got a concentrated dose of stories, or snatches of stories when I was there. Michelangelo always appeared as a part of it. Old guys at the bars would say: ‘He knew the work.’ They don’t talk about him as one of the greatest Western artists. They talk about him as someone who understood stone.”

Several biographies on Michelangelo, as well as a background in art history and training as a painter informed Scigliano’s work. A reporter with a nose for poetic detail – an earlier nonfiction book “Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationships Between Elephants and Humans” was well-received by critics – Scigliano was surprised to uncover a new sense of Michelangelo.

“I was surprised by his earthiness and stoniness,” said Scigliano. “The stone carver and the construction foreman, the quarry foreman, the stone hound. I had envisioned him as a solitary genius and artist. I had studied him as the man with exalted ideas and enormous aesthetic ambitions. It was surprisingly bracing to jump into the practical details of his life. To think that he was someone who thought his way through all sorts of trouble and drudgery as he was wrestling with stone; he fumed and railed about it. Having rehabbed an old house or two along the way and done construction work when I was young, I could feel the dirt under his nails. And yet he still carried those exalted ideas. He wasn’t a systematic philosopher, but a poet. But even his philosophical musing come from the stone.”

Although Scigliano is dedicated to journalism – he was recently offered a job at a magazine in Seattle – he is also mulling over three ideas he has for novels, as well as the idea of moving to Maine. The books will be his first attempt at longer fiction and his second attempt at writing about an artist. Who else? Michelangelo.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.