Portfolio: Lou païsatge dë marmou
I am not a photographer but an architect who use the photographic medium as a
tool to knowledge, investigate and measure architecture and landscape. Italy is an
anthropized land since ancient times, as a matter of fact even the alpine wilderness is
altered by human history. I grew up in a land at the foot of the Alps, closer to France than
to Turin, a land where for centuries two religions, two languages and in the past two
kingdoms have coexisted often alternating wars and peace.
The study of Savoy baroque architecture led me to research the origins in the Alps
of the marbles of ducal magnificence. Where do the columns, decorations and sculptures
of palaces and churches come from? Who worked in the mountains to extract it? How did
they altered the landscape, what signs remain intact under the contemporary landscape
traces?
Among written texts, archive documents and historical maps I collected elements to
find in the landscape of the Val Germanasca a story of forgotten men in a territory full of
traces of a complex history.
In the periods of peace between the wars of religion, this impervious valley once called
Valle Oscura (Dark Valley), it was a territory closed like an Alpine ghetto for Protestants.
Here Occitan was and is still spoken, not italian, nor piedmontese nor french. From 1600
to 2200 meters, among the larches and stony ground, starting from XVII century, the
marble was carved and worked at the Rocho Blancho, the Rocho Couërbo, moved on the
Vio dë marmou and cutted at La Réiso. Rocca Bianca and Rocca Corba, the two main
marble quarries of San Martino. This was the marble of Venaria Reale, Palazzo Reale, the
Church of the Consolata. The Via dei Marmi designed by the ducal architect Amedeo di
Castellamonte and the marble sawmill, tell the story of the men who worked behind the
great architecture of the past and how, by hand and bodies, they modified the Alpine
landscape. The signs of their life, hidden and forgotten in the natural environment, are
engraved on the rock as a matrix of those distant works of art are a memory of political
power in the city.
Below the photographs of the Rocca Bianca quarry, certainly active since the 17th
century, located on a ridge at 2200 metres, where a community of stonemasons worked in
isolation. The houses there were built with marble waste and their names engraved during
the period of peace between the religious wars. The Rocca Corba quarry, a huge hall dugs
into the mountain wall with the tip and the mallet. The inclined plane along which the large
blocks were lowered onto the larch trunks, still visible among the woods and stony ground.
Between these pictures those of Piazza dell'Annunziata in Venaria Reale, where the
statues of the evangelists, the archangel gabriel and the Santa Annunziata where made of
this marble.
This portfolio is an extract from a larger work in progress on the marbles of the Turin
Alps. This work on the ancient quarries of white statuary marble of San Martino has never
been published. The shooting work went on the 2023, also due to the place isolation and
difficulty of reaching them, which require hiking for hours.
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HISTORICAL NOTES
Rocca Bianca (2384 m above sea level) or Roccho Blancho in Occitan is a peak
located along the mountain ridge between the Faetto and the San Martino valley, the
current Germanasca valley. The toponym immediately identifies the appearance of its
marble front visible from Chisone valley. The white marble, originating in the pre-Triassic
from the alteration of the deposits of the Ligurian-Piedmontese ocean, has a statuary
quality which not escaped from the observation and use by the superintendents of the
Duke of Savoy's factories. The statuary quality of the marble was such that its use was
reserved and exclusive to the Duke of Savoy. We find traces of its use since the early 1600
in the Church of the Consolata in Torino.
In 1561 with the Peace of Cavour, the Duke of Savoy Emanule Filiberto established
the right to publicly profess the reformed Waldensian religion in the valleys of Luserna,
Perosa and San Martino. For centuries, until the Letters Patent of 1848, these valleys
became an enclave of the reformed Protestant world.
Ces peuples, jusqu'alors inconnus, avaient tort, sans doute, d'être nés Vaudois;
c'était leur seule iniquité. Ils étaient établis depuis trois cents ans dans des déserts et sur
des montagnes qu'ils avaient rendus fertiles par un travail incroyable. Leur vie pastorale et
tranquille retraçait l'innocence attribuée aux premiers âges du monde. Les villes voisines
n'étaient connues d'eux que par le trafic des fruits qu'ils allaient vendre, ils ignoraient les
procès et la guerre; ils ne se défendirent pas: on les égorgea comme des animaux fugitifs
qu'on tue dans une enceinte.
Traité sur la tolérance, Voltaire, 1763
The particular geographical location, the proximity to the French dominions, where
numerous and combative groups of reformed lived, the increasingly close exchanges with
Geneva and the other non-Catholic Cantons had guaranteed the Waldensian communities
relative tranquility. But between April 17 and early May 1655 the Marquis Giacinto de
Simiane di Pianezza, with the aid of the French militias destined to the siege of Pavia and
the Irish mercenaries, they chased the Waldenses away over the mountains and sacked
the valleys, burning houses, churches, villages and exterminating the population, in what
were remembered as the Piedmontese Easters. The Patente di Grazia of Pinerolo on 1655
August 18 put an end to the persecution by restoring the Pace di Cavour. On 1664
February 14, with the Peace Treaty of Turin, the war of the bandits was put to an end and
twenty years of peace began in the Waldensian valleys.
In those same years the ducal architect Amedeo di Castellamonte, supervisor of
the project and works of the Venaria Reale palace, widely used marble from the Valle di S.
Martino, the marble from Rocca Bianca. Since the quarry was located at 2200 meters of
altitude, the importance of the road for transporting the blocks was fundamental. Thus,
between 1673 and 1674 the Marble Road or the Vio dî marmou (occ.) was restored,
whose route and bridges had been destroyed during the wars of persecution of the
Protestant populations confined in the Valley.
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Altezza Reale,
« Io non deuo più differire l'andarmene
nella Valle di S. Martino
per vedere come abbino operato sin hora,
e quello vi manca
per compimento di quella strada, e penso
partir di mattina come
ho promesso al conte Beccaria. Ma perchè
parmi che V. A. R. si
risolva che la sua Venaria Reale si stampi
qui in Torino, risolutione
buonissima […]
Torino, li 2 giugno 1673.
Hum.mo ser.re
Amedeo Castellamonte
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His Royal Highness,
I have no longer to postpone going to the
Valle di S. Martino
to see how they have worked so far, and
what is missing
to complete that road, and I think I'll leave
in the morning as I promised to the Count
Beccaria. All that because it seem to me
that in this way Your Excellency does be
sure that your Venaria Reale be very good
built here in Turin […]
Turin, 1673 June 2.
Your Humble Servant
Amedeo Castellamonte
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The master stonemasons, coming from other valleys, almost certainly Catholic,
carved their names on the first quarry face: Michelangelo Ramello 1673, Magno Bux 1673,
Michel Antoni Rosa 1674, Marco Antonio Aprile 1674, Fran.co Buzo 1678, Giovan. Pietro
Tadei 1684.
Despite the high quality of the marble, used in the main ducal architecture and
churches of Turin, the difficulty of working in the high mountains, the impervious road to
bring the blocks to the valley floor and the alternation of periods of peace with religious
wars, the quarries of Rocca bianca and Rocca Corba were cultivated and abandoned for
long alternating periods. The Rocca Bianca quarry was cultivated for 5 months of the year
by a community of stonemasons who lived in the small white buildings built on the ridge
with marble waste.
In the more accessible outcrop of Rocca Corba or Roccho Couërbo (Occ.) the
statuary marble was extracted in tunnels, cutting the blocks with chisels. An enormous hall
was dug by hand on the compact side of the mountain. The walls are completely designed
by the work of years of chisel. From here the large blocks were lowered onto the larch
trunks along an inclined plane hundreds of meters long, still visible among the woods and
stony ground. A little further downstream, along the course of the stream, a marble sawmill
La Réiso (Occ.) was built by the royal sculptor and professor of the Albertina Academy of
Turin Giuseppe Gaggini.
From an impervious valley whose ancient name was Valle Oscura, which for
centuries became a ghetto for the Protestant populations, located on the border between
the Duchy of Savoy and the Kingdom of France, a disputed place and theater of wars and
religious repression, where people speaks Occitan, not French nor Italian, the white
statuary marbles for the magnificent architecture of the Ducal court came.
In this territory, the intertwining of its history, the traces of the marble landscape
remains, the signs of work, peace, art and human ingenuity, the signs of an apparently
minor history, the hidden side of Savoy baroque architecture and how it altered the alpine