Paesine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Paesine[1] (also called ruin marbles or landscape marbles) are limestone metamorphic rocks used for decorative effect. They are found in Italy and England.
The name paesine is the Italian plural of paesina, a cognate of paesaggio, Italian for landscape.
Numerous cracks and the effect of mineral salts give the rocks a specific look when sawn and polished. Each successive slab shows a different design, evoking ruin-like landscapes: green, blue or gray suggest the sky and the sea, the veins brown houses, castles, towers, dungeons and fortifications, churches and villages in ruins or shores, cliffs and caves. The largest can measure nearly a meter long and twenty centimeters in height.
They are also called 'Tuscany marbles' or 'Florence marbles'.
Roger Caillois in The Writing of Stones says that they come from a site near Florence, and the landscape marbles from a quarry near Cotham, Bristol, also called Cotham marbles[2].
See also
- Roger_Caillois_and_pictorial_stones#Pa.C3.A9sine_ou_pierres-aux-masures
- 50watts
- Stromatolite
- Landscape art
![[2]](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marbre_de_Bristol.1.jpg?uselang=fr){kind=link}