Milan Cathedral
There is a marble quarry in the Italian Alps that has been working since 1387, but in 639 years, it has had only one customer.
The quarry is at Candoglia, at the mouth of the Ossola valley.
On 24 October 1387, Gian Galeazzo Visconti decided that the cathedral going up in his city should be built of marble rather than brick, and handed the quarry over to the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, the body established to build it.
He also granted the stone free passage down the waterways to Milan.
The blocks went by raft from the Toce river into Lake Maggiore, down the Ticino, along the Naviglio Grande, then through a system of locks into a small lake in the centre of the city, a few hundred metres from the site.
The bargemen carried the letters AUF, for "ad usum fabricae," for the use of the works, which cleared the cargo through customs without charge.
People in Lombardy still say "a ufo" for something got for nothing, and the phrase is traditionally traced back to those barges.
Mark Twain came in 1867 and noticed something most visitors walk past:
"We saw a new statue put in its niche yesterday alongside of one which had been standing these four hundred years."
It has never stopped: around a thousand tonnes of Candoglia marble still comes out of the mountain every year, and all of it goes to the same building.
In a workshop in the Certosa district, sculptors cut replacements for whatever the weather has eaten away, from the same stone, for the same institution, founded in 1387.
The cathedral was declared finished in 1965 but the quarry never stopped, because a cathedral like this is not something you complete. It is inherited, kept, and handed on.
As John Ruskin wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture:
"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone.
Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them:
‘See! This our fathers did for us.’"
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