Do you know how to detach a block of marble? Find out with this video!

Strength, power, skill, precision: it is truly impressive to see how these words are transformed into reality and translated into physical effort, sweat and great experience in gesture and action.

In this video, shot in an amateur manner and therefore very realistic, a friend of ours, a marble quarryman by profession, shows us how a block of marble, in this case a block of Valentine Grey marble, is extracted from the quarry.

See how he works? It sounds strange, but we are probably seeing how the ancient Egyptians worked thousands of years ago to extract the stones that would raise the pyramids to the sky, or how the ancient Romans worked to obtain the blocks needed to build the Colosseum.

With one big and decisive difference: thousands of slaves worked in the quarries from which the marble and stone for the Egyptian and Roman architects came. The quarrymen, the workers, all the workers (sometimes even the architects) were enslaved men.

Our friend in the video, on the other hand, is a free man, a marble professional, a man who knows his trade and above all knows marble and its secrets. He knows how to handle the right tools, he knows the power and limits of his own physicality, he knows where to intervene, and because of his experience he is respected and valued in the production chain.

In spite of the modern technology available today, our quarryman shows us in the video a very delicate and ‘manual’ phase of marble extraction. In the case of Valentine Grey marble, the most commonly used technology is the “continuous wire”: by means of a mechanical abrasion obtained with a helical wire, the stone bank is first detached on the sides and on the back side.  The next step is to intervene manually… and this is where our quarryman comes in: after having made “invitation holes” (at the right distance, otherwise the marble block risks disintegrating!), iron bars are inserted.

In this phase the perfect calibration between force, power and attention to the delicacy of the material is played out. With well-aimed and well-balanced hammer blows, the marble block comes off. An intact and perfect marble with its luminous white and golden veins on a grey background, typical of a quality Valentine Grey: a block of precious marble, artfully extracted with great professionalism and experience by our protagonist, a specialised quarryman.