Collemandina Red

† 07-04-2019 † 2695 views

Sassorosso is a "Pink" village in the green Garfagnana. It is a small mountain town, one of the most characteristic of Tuscany: its houses, built exclusively with local stones, mostly in pink, offer a unique natural color effect. The village, surrounded by green pastures, rises at the base of a rocky cone formed geologically in the Jurassic, composed of sedimentary calcareous layers rich in Ammonites (Cephalopod molluscs), which over the millennia have given the rock the typical color of that marble the "Collemandina Red". Since ancient times men extracted from small quarries on site the stones necessary for the construction of their houses, without paying attention to their color, creating those picturesque walls that we can define as "irregular chessboard", where red marble stones are interspersed with stones lightly streaked with light greenish, making the village unique. Today the extraction of this marble, (mainly used in construction to achieve valuable flooring and interior decoration), continues in a quarry just below the village, on the northwest slope of the mountain, while on the top of the rocky cone it is still possible to visit an old quarry now in disuse, where the thousand shades of the "Collemandina Red" are clearly visible in the cutten rocks.