Marble in the Roman World (II BC - AD II)

Rocks and minerals always fascinated people who used them as jewelleries, make-up, construction material, to build roads, aqueducts, but above all-they used them to express themselves, to express art. My study is focused both on the economic and the artistic sides and for this paper I chose as a subject the marble due to the extraordinary attention that was given to it inside the Roman Empire during the antiquity. The romans started to excavate and use rocks first at local scale – from and within the Italian Peninsula. The appetite grew with the expansion of the roman dominance and it got more and more diverse while the empire was engulfing new territories. We are speaking here about every possible stone that you can imagine. Everything that could cost something was brought to Rome. It is the case of marble too which had a sort of VIP status due to her physical properties. The goal of this paper is to make the connection between geology, archaeology and art and present history through another perspective, through perspective of marble.