If you’re planning a holiday in La Spezia, make room in your itinerary for the extraordinary Carrara marble quarries, one of Italy’s most famous wonders and just a 30-minute drive away.

The Carrara marble quarries are known around the world for their exceptionally fine white marble, extracted since Roman times and used to build monuments, palaces and works of art of immeasurable value. Carrara marble has long been a byword for elegance and quality, and it is still exported across the globe today.

The bond between Carrara and art is unbreakable. It was from these very mountains that Michelangelo personally chose the blocks destined to become some of his most celebrated sculptures. Walking among the quarries, you can’t help but be captivated by the immense white walls rising against the Apuan Alps, carving out a landscape unlike anywhere else on earth.

For an even more thrilling experience, guided tours take you inside the working quarries, where you’ll learn how the marble is cut and extracted and take in spectacular, breathtaking panoramas. Some tours travel by 4×4 up into the mountains, others lead into vast underground chambers where the stone glows in the artificial light. Either way, the scale of it is impossible to convey in photographs.

Thanks to the strategic position of the Downtown Blue Apartment, a few minutes’ walk from La Spezia railway station and close to all the main services in town, you can easily combine this excursion with visits to the Cinque Terre, Portovenere, Lerici or the Gulf of Poets. Days out inland and days on the coast slot together with no wasted travel time.

After a day spent among the dazzling white marble mountains and the story of a material that conquered the world, coming home to La Spezia is the perfect way to round things off.

The Downtown Blue Apartment is waiting to offer you a comfortable stay in an ideal position, the perfect starting point for discovering the beauty of Liguria and nearby Tuscany.