IMPORTANT (EVEN IN ITS GENEROUS DIMENSIONS) CHARLES X FIREPLACE (STYLE IN ITALY KNOWN BY THE APPELLATION "LATE EMPIRE") IN PRECIOUS PORTORO MARBLE, THE QUARRYING OF WHICH ENDED NEARLY FORTY YEARS AGO.
HOW STRANGE IS THE WORLD... Now I'm thinking about the fact that until a few years ago (at least until about fifteen/twenty years ago..), Portoro marble fireplaces were easier to find... and I used to buy them, finding them beautiful, mysterious and fascinating, with their black hell mixed with the color of gold
I used to buy them and . I was having a hard time selling them, hardly anyone wanted them… I didn't understand why, since they looked so beautiful to me!
The customers, when I would try to magnify to them the features of these fireplaces while they wanted to go ahead and see something else, would scoff like this. "But. Maurizio, this is black!!! (of course it is black, but what a beautiful black, my lady...). Or “I don't like it because I find it funerary” (have you ever seen a tombstone in black Portoro Impossible it costs too much today and it cost too much even then, this marble... perhaps the only one who has used a little of it in his mausoleum, the one he built himself in the grounds of his villa in Arcore, is Berlusca). A lady once replied to me, “No, too black.... (and what do you reply to a person who apostrophizes you like that?! What does “too black” mean? Black is Black and Enough, no?!) and so on and so forth.
Today, however, since architects and interior designers all over the world, to the cry of “Women, unite!!!” have decided that black must be one of the two dominant colors of a house (the other being white), the speeches of my clients are, more or less, these:. “ Maurizio - note that the woman in question has just entered my warehouse, she has not yet seen any of my many, many fireplaces, however...- Maurizio, do you have any black fireplaces for us to see!?”............ Or, phone call from Milan or Rome or Cortina: “Look, we'll come, but if you don't have any black fireplaces tell us right away because the architect told us that we can only fit black fireplaces.. (the doctor advised her, to her architect. What does she do, commit suicide if she can't find one! )..... “Black fireplaces kill me, tell me you have some, Maurizio” (don't die, ma'am, please, or at least die for a nobler cause...)..... “Only a black fireplace fits in my house, but... black black black, eh!!! (will it be Frankestein's house, or maybe the lady's last name is Adams!? ).
EHH. HOW THE WORLD CHANGES….
Now, unfortunately, I have very few mantels in Black Portoro marble. As of today, as I write this comment, out of the thousand or so antique fireplaces in our warehouse, I have only TWO fireplaces (this Griffe de Lion and a Louis Philippe Palmettes), two specimens in all which are probably more than all the specimens one could find by going to visit all the dealers in Italy
All this tirade to justify the price of the specimen I am showing you here, a fireplace that, if it were carved in White Carrara marble, would cost €5/6000 (less than half of this brother in Nero Portoro..) It is the law of supply and demand, what can you do.
Anyway, it may cost that much, but at least it is in beautiful condition (some restoration-essentially a little maquillage-without replacement of marble parts), it was built in the first half of the 19th century (1830/40), and it comes to us from a French Riviera “batiment” and not from a Chinese pantograph.
HISTORY OF PORTORO MARBLE, FROM THE ROMANS TO THE PRESENT DAY
The small island called “La Palmaria,” in the Gulf of La Spezia, was once home to quarries of Portoro, a black marble with yellow-gold veins, nearly 200 million years old and highly prized; in fact, it ranks third on the list of the one hundred most expensive marbles in the world The black color is given by the abundant presence of organic substance; the golden streaks, on the other hand, are due to a partial process of “dolomitization” (a kind of “petrification” carried out by mineral elements including, first and foremost, iron and sulfur) that has destroyed, by oxidizing it, the organic substance Portoro mining dates back to Roman times; this marble was later rediscovered in the 16th century by Genoese sculptor Domenico Casella, who obtained a concession from the senate of Genoa to exploit the rock Since then, this small island began to be dotted with quarries Marble extraction on the island was more difficult than on the mainland, however, because the quarry started a few meters above sea level and then lowered to below that level; therefore, it was necessary, at the beginning of each day, before work could begin, to extract the water that entered the tunnels during the night The most spectacular excavation is 150 meters overhanging the sea, on the western slope, in a dizzying place Here the wall is vertical with a small flat space laboriously carved out by the quarrymen for processing and sending the boulders that were to be shipped down there, among the waves The very first blocks that came out of the island's quarries and the sculptors' chisel served for the church of S. Maria alla Spezia and the palace of the Marquises of Castagnola In the early nineteenth century, Portoro marble began to be exported to many countries in Europe and later to America; Paramount's large projection room is all lined with it! One quarry on La Palmaria was named Carlo Alberto for the visit the king of Sardinia made to the island on October 2, 1838
The last quarry to be closed, following an ordinance issued in 1982-83 by the municipal administration, concerned about the environmental degradation that had become evident, was that of La Caletta, where the remains of equipment and remnants of marble blocks can still be found.
