Our Italian Carrara Marble fruit is so realistic that one may easily mistake it for a real piece of fruit!
Each orange is carved from an only piece of White Carrara marble, sculpted and hand painted with pigments of natural origin and bee wax, using the same methods of Michelangelo age. A true work of art.
Each fruit is made unique by small irregularities of shape and colour.
A natural fruit stem is added as a realistic touch.
Handmade in Italy
Colors may vary. Colors in photograph are close but may not represent true colors.
SIZE: 3.25 inches Height
INCLUDES ONE ORANGE
PREORDER FROM ITALY
ALLOW 3-4 weeks for delivery.
In stock items will ship immediately from our warehouse in the US.
The orange tree, originally from China and Japan, arrived in Italy in 1400 with the Moors: since then it has grown luxuriantly throughout our south, especially in Calabria and Sicily.
Its fragrant flowers are called 'zagara' and are the favourite flowers for brides' bouquets. From the orange blossom, but also from orange peel, essences are distilled to make perfumes.
At the foot of the Apuan Alps, Carrara is unique in the world for its marble quarries. The “white gold of the Apuan Alps”: this is how the marble of Carrara is defined, a precious stone with which important works have been realised and that has made this town, for centuries devoted to its extraction and processing, great.
One of the first people to venture into marble quarrying were the Romans who, by inserting beams of fig wood inside natural fissures in the rock, filled these with water until they were completely impregnated and caused the rock to split. This extraction technique remained unchanged, if not with minor variations, until the Renaissance when Michelangelo began to frequent the Carrara area to directly choose the raw material for his works: it was from Carrara, transported along the Arno, that the block from which the Maestro sculpted the famous David came.
Marble thus became an important raw material for the construction, furnishing and decoration of public buildings and patrician residences.
Even today, skillful artists and craftsmen still work this material with mastery, creating stupendous works of art and decorative objects that become true furnishing accessories.
