In 1989, I was thrilled to be invited to go carve marble in a weeks-long workshop in Lucca, Italy, under the instruction of a bona fide marble-carving maestro, Professore Roberto Bertola.

I was excited because up until that point, I had only carved the softer stones like soapstone and softer varieties of alabaster.

Marble is in a higher class of hardness on the Moh scale, requiring completely different tools and procedures.

It would be a challenge for me to change horses mid-stream — going from soft to very hard, dense stone, different chisels and rasps, air tools, heavier stone…

First, he taught us about the various types of marble, their colors, characteristics and challenges. Some marble has very fine ‘grain,’ or crystals, like the famed Carrara marble, from the quarry up in the Apuan Alps, a mountain range in northern Tuscany.

Viewing the quarry from below, or across from another mountainside, it looks like a wide swath of cover has been scraped off by some giant hand, revealing the brilliant white understory. It takes your breath away. Nope, that’s stone, not snow!

They call the best Carrara marble ‘statuario’ — marble fit for figurative sculptures like the Pietà. It ranges from pure white to a blueish-gray. Did you know marble has been quarried there for 2000-plus years?

Other types range from grey through all the colors, including dark green, wavy-streaked blues, and even bright orange! Many types have swirly, swoopy lines of color or inclusions, making it really hard to carve. Those swirls can be insanely hard compared to the other parts of the stone, making it near impossible to get smooth lines or surfaces.

Some are brittle, easy to break, while others are so hard you can whack it with all your strength and all it does is sit there and laugh at you holding your hand from the sting of the backfired energy o