Marble Slab Yard in Los Angeles Royal Stone Slabs and Tile on Sepulveda 90064

Available at Royal Stone & Tile ins Los Angeles, Carrara marble is one of the most prestigious marbles from Italy and in the rest of the world. At Royal Stone, a slab of Italian Carrara can cost up to $400 per square meter (about $37.17 per square foot), and over history, it has been used for some remarkable buildings and more. The Pantheon in Rome or Michelagelo's iconic statue, David. The luxury stone comes the Apuan Alps, a mountain range in northern Tuscany that stretches for 58 km and reaches 2,000 meters high. 

Marble has been carved here since the Ancient Roman times, and because of its millennial history, the Carrara quarries have produced more marble than any other place on Earth. The market as a whole is worth over €1 billion ($1.1 billion) and produces 4 million tons of marble every year, with 13,000 people involved. The quarries were even featured in a James Bond movie, with Daniel Craig driving an Aston Martin DBS up the marble slopes. 

We visited two quarries: Cava Querciola, number 147, and Cava Fiordichiara, number 76, which is a cave inside a mountain. Marble extraction in Carrara is done with a 5-millimeter diamond wire or with big chainsaws. 

Depending on how they are extracted and on their veins, some marbles will be more expensive than others. For example, a slab of Statuario or Calacatta marble can cost over €10,000 ($11,000) per ton. The more expensive one is usually the type of marble that's exported. Last year, 1.2 million tons of blocks crossed the Italian border to China, the United States, and Germany as the top 3. 

The marble that stays goes to local businesses and artisanal workshops, which are distributed along the coastal towns of western Tuscany. Standing out is the town of Pietrasanta, or "the city of marble" called so because of its continuous flow of artists. Unlike foreign companies who seek the most luxurious slab, artisans in Pietrasanta are looking for the perfect stone to bring to life, as Michelangelo used to say.