When David MacFarlane's sculptor friend first invited him to visit the Carrara mountain region of Tuscany he leapt at the chance. Quickly seduced by the people, the art, the wine and the landscape, this community of artists and marble workers became to the writer an endless opera of loves and jealousies, triumphs and failures. But it was the thriving industry of marble, a microcosm of human life, that absolutely intrigued him: how experts learn to detect flaws in the stone before cutting into it, how the world-famous Tuscan stone is cut, shipped and put to use for everything from an opera auditorium to a Beverly Hills bidet.