Cipollino marble

How does it form?

Cipollino is a marble: limestone that recrystallised without melting under heat and pressure deep underground. The original limestone was not pure, and during metamorphism its clay and other impurities turned into green, iron-bearing silicate minerals such as chlorite and epidote, along with thin layers of mica.

These green minerals gathered in layers, and the rock was later folded. The result is a stone with wavy bands in which whitish calcite alternates with green, silicate-rich layers. That is why cipollino is classed as a silicate marble, one that contains a significant amount of silicate minerals besides calcite. The grains are 0.2–0.6 mm across, large enough to be seen with the naked eye. The intensity of the colour varies from quarry to quarry; on Euboea the stone becomes darker in the quarries further north.

What is it used for?

• Roman columns: The Greeks were the first to work it. The stone was first brought to Rome in the 2nd century BC and became widespread from the 1st century BC. The Romans used it above all for large, smooth column shafts, as in the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Basilica Aemilia and the imperial forums. After AD 17 the Karystos quarries became imperial property.
• Houses and sculpture: Pliny the Elder wrote that cipollino was used in the homes of wealthy Roman families. It was also used for statues and the torsos of busts.
• Byzantine times and later: Cipollino was used in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (537) and in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice (1094). The Ottomans also reused stone taken from older buildings: the Green Mosque at İznik has a single cipollino verde facing slab 1.25 m long, a stone that is rare even in Istanbul.
• Today: It is still quarried on a small scale on Euboea, and similar cipollino-type marbles from Italy and Switzerland were used as facing stone in 19th- and 20th-century buildings.

Where is it found?

Ancient cipollino came from quarries on the south-west coast of Euboea between Styra and Karystos and on the slopes of Mount Ochi; some ancient quarry faces are more than 100 metres long. A grey variety called “cipollino nero” was also quarried in the same area. Similar marbles were worked in Italy in the Apuan Alps and at Valdieri near Cuneo, and in Switzerland at Saillon in Valais. Stone from the Valdieri quarries went into buildings in Turin such as the Church of the Holy Spirit, the Bank of Italy building and the Polytechnic, and a yellow-orange cipollino was quarried at Desertetto from the 1920s to the 1970s. The quarry of the Swiss “Cipolin de Saillon” was worked from 1876 to 1926.