ABSTRACT
The exploitation of the Carrara Marble dates since the Romans and in these two thousand years the quarrying activity has been mainly developed in wide deep pit quarries. But in the last twenty years many quarries moved underground due to both environmental concerns and mining optimisation. At the beginning many of these underground quarries were worked without any geomechanical study, any design, or any bolts or reinforcements, guided only by the instinct and experience of the quarrymen. The widening of the underground quarries, which made the present very large sized caverns, and new concerns for safety forced designers to develop geomechanical studies oriented almost exclusively to understand the geostructural setting, geomechanical properties and stability behaviour of the Carrara Marble in order to design safe large caverns for mining the best grade Marble of the Carrara district. The main problems in reaching this goal involve: the geostructural assessment and geometric prospecting of the best grade layers, the correct survey of the geomechanical features of the marble rock-mass and the correct analysis of the physical-mechanical properties of the marble rock-mass. To deal with all these factors, to ensure the safety of the work environment and to best exploitate the Carrara Marble are the real challenges for the next few decades.
