Carrara beyond the sea, a discovery you don't expect

When one thinks of Carrara, two things probably come to mind: the beaches of Versilia and the white marble of the quarries. In reality, it is a city that in recent years has reinvented itself as one of Tuscany's most interesting cultural destinations. The marble town that everyone knows has become an open-air cultural workshop where tradition and contemporaneity meet to create something completely new. Here, every project is born from the collaboration between international designers and local craftsmen, everything takes shape from the large historic quarries to the small family workshops.

White Carrara 2025 - Augures_ Velthune_ Cactus, Nicola Maggi - Foto Enrico Amici

Until 28 September 2025, the historic centre of Carrara undergoes an extraordinary transformation thanks to White Carrara, an international design festival now in its ninth edition, a 'diffuse creative workshop' that transforms every corner of the centre into a surprise. During the festival, the town becomes an open-air museum where art is mixed with everyday life. The theme is 'Design Here and Now' and means something simple but ingenious: the world's most beautiful marble worked by the world's most talented designers to create objects that speak of today. You can meet: none other than Karim Rashid, the designer who has designed 4,000 everyday objects, Ross Lovegrove, the Englishman famous for creating objects that look like creatures from an alien (but beautiful) world, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the French architect who has the magic touch of elegance. There are also the young talents such as Kickie Chudikova, who from Bratislava via New York experiments with the future of design, and above all the Italian masters: Elena Salmistraro, Giulio Iacchetti (two Compassi d'Oro!), Massimo Giacon who designed for Alessi.

White Carrara 2025 - Cane Mangia Cane, Massimo Giacon - Foto Enrico Amici

The CARMI, the museum dedicated to Carrara and Michelangelo, is hosting 'Per forza di levare', a fascinating exhibition with eighty historical photographs from the Alinari Archives, until October. Here the great photographers of the 19th century demonstrate how to photograph the three-dimensionality of marble sculptures. Visual Arts and Experimentation at the mudaC │museo delle arti Carrara hosting Vincenzo Marsiglia's exhibition 'Stars and Dust', exploring the frontiers of mixed reality and artificial intelligence in contemporary art. In the project room Gianluca Sgherri exhibits "Uninverso", an installation that deconstructs spatial perceptions through a dynamic and immersive labyrinth.

White Carrara 2025 - JoJo, Donia Maaoui - Foto Enrico Amici

Carrara is discovered slowly, by stopping to talk to artisans in their workshops, entering improvised galleries, watching live demonstrations of how a design object is created from a rough block of marble. The great thing about Carrara during White Carrara is that all you have to do is stroll through the historic centre to continually come across installations, open workshops, and meetings with artists. It is like a treasure hunt where every street hides a surprise. It is always nice to combine a visit to the festival with a trip to the marble quarries (always spectacular) and maybe a day at the beach.