Behind the scenes at one of Italy’s premier stonecutting workshops, where travertine from Tuscany’s ancient quarries is transformed into masterpieces for the home
The interior of a kitchen crafted in Arabescato marble by Vaselli, a family-owned company in Tuscany.By Peter J. Frank /
November 7, 2024
In a vast, chilly warehouse near the village of Rapolano Terme, 20 miles outside of Siena, Italy, artisans labor over huge blocks of stone, forcing them to submit to their will. Stacked all around them are massive hunks of creamy travertine with countless layers of sedimentation, gray marble streaked with green and purple veins, jagged-edged cubes of orange and yellow and pink. In one corner, a gigantic saw slowly slices a monolithic piece of marble into thick slabs. Nearby, large robotic arms carve chamfered edges into a countertop. In another section, men hunch over nearly finished pieces, shaping, sanding, and polishing them by hand, shouting to be heard over the drones and whines of the machinery.
This is the workshop of Vaselli, a family-owned company that transforms these blocks — many of them sourced from centuries-old quarries in Rapolano — into stylish items for the home. Leading interior designers covet Vaselli’s custom creations: altar-like kitchen islands, with tops and sides sheathed in identical sheets of purple-swirled Breccia Capraia marble; deep soaking tubs carved from a single block of ivory-toned Rapolano travertine; a freestanding washbasin hewn from Arabescato marble, its top an intersecting grid of polygon cutouts that direct the flow of water as if over a boulder-filled river. Vaselli’s furniture and architectural pieces resonate with history — what material could be more time-honored than stone? — and showcase modern-day technique.
“Every day we make something different — this is not an assembly line,” says Danilo Vaselli, the company’s president. “Artisans are also inventors. You need time to find new solutions for new problems.”
Putting the finishing touches on a marble countertop. 
Stacks of travertine at a quarry in Rapolano.
A June outdoor kitchen being assembled in the Vaselli workshop.Travertine is to Rapolano what marble is to Carrara: its foundation and its lifeblood. The stone has been extracted in the area since the Etruscan era, and the medieval town of Serre di Rapolano is quite literally built of it. Rapolano travertine, prized for its ivory and beige tones and distinctive veining, was used to construct Siena’s iconic Torre del Mangia, the Duomo in Pienza, and Montepulciano’s Temple of San Biagio. To this day, stone quarries and workshops power the local economy.
Danilo is the third generation of Vasellis working with stone in Rapolano. His grandfather, Ottavio, labored in the quarries. His father, Veraldo, trained as a chiseler and later became a respected carver before starting a company that supplied stone to large construction products (the Riyadh airport, for one). Danilo and his brother and sister founded the current incarnation of Vaselli in 1994, collaborating with designers such as Gabriele Devecchi on tabletop items before expanding into bathrooms and, later, kitchens. Danilo’s son Andrea carries on the legacy and helps him run the business today.
There are only about 30 employees in the workshop, and they create a limited number of products — around 10 to 15 kitchens per year, for example. They gather around with Danilo as a slab of Pietra da Torre — a delicate local limestone mottled with gray, yellow, and pink fragments, a mosaic crafted by time and nature — is loaded into a CNC machine. Around the size of a tollbooth, the CNC is an extremely high-powered, AI-assisted robotic drill that transforms the raw material into whatever the plans call for. It’s a technological marvel, its arm operating on five axes to create curved, beveled, or chamfered edges and automatically selecting the right blade or bit to complete the job. It’s like a 3D printer that removes material instead of adding it.
Just as Michelangelo would chisel and carve until David emerged, the CNC machine can transform a gigantic lump of stone into a sculptural tub or basin that preserves the integrity and characteristics of the original block. A CNC can methodically slice a block into slabs to create a kitchen island with continuous veining on all sides; it can ensure the edges of the doors and drawers line up perfectly. Any leftover stone is recycled into smaller products, gravel, or cement.
“Fifty years ago a bathtub would be done by hand,” says Andrea Vaselli. “The CNC is precise down to the millimeter, but the big advantage is that it’s much faster: This machine can work 24/7.” Still, the work is slow going — that countertop alone will spend 85 hours in the CNC — but Rome wasn’t built in a day, either.
“It’s taken hundreds of thousands of years to make this stone, so we have to respect it”
Afterward, pieces are brought to the finishing area, where one artisan pulls a large sander back and forth across a sheet of beige Bianco Rapolano stone, changing the disks three or four times to achieve a satiny honed finish, or five or six for a glossier polished finish. Nearby, another worker bends over a copper-orange travertine tub headed for a project in Miami, shaving the edges smooth and filling tiny fissures with a slurry made from the dust produced in earlier steps. A few feet away, a sink bound for a project in Denmark awaits sandblasting for a textured finish.
The June outdoor kitchen is hewn from a single block of Tuscan travertine. 
Vaselli’s Waterfall washbasin is topped with a faceted grid inspired by flowing water. 
Company president Danilo Vaselli supervises every aspect of fabrication. 
The Chrysalis outdoor kitchen, carved from a monolithic piece of Becagli travertine. 
With its own metalworking studio, Vaselli keeps nearly all production in-house. Vaselli even has its own woodworking and metalworking studios for interior components. (The only elements not produced in-house are hardware and electrical wiring; Vaselli doesn’t use melamine or other artificial materials.) To create a wooden drawer liner or cutlery insert, for example, Vaselli sources the oak, lets it season in the studio for several months, and eventually laminates and cuts it to shape. “This takes a long time, but now the wood is more stable and more durable,” says Danilo. “Without time, it’s not possible to drink a good wine — or to have a good kitchen.”
As befits a third-generation stonecutter, Danilo has an innate, even spiritual, instinct for the material. With each new project, he personally selects each block from the quarry, studying it for days before deciding which section will become the tub or which will be sliced into matching wall panels. That, coupled with an enthusiastic spirit of experimentation, helps overcome his lack of formal engineering training.
“We’ll try something one, 10, 20 times, changing systems, changing tools, to arrive at the solution,” say Danilo, explaining how Vaselli hollows out cabinet doors to a thickness of just 2.5mm (1/10 inch) and reinforces them with a honeycomb-like material to decrease the weight and prevent sagging over time. “Natural materials are unique and unpredictable, like human beings. But that’s what makes it interesting.”
Vaselli’s frequent collaborations with designers on product lines present new challenges. The June outdoor kitchen, designed by Kensaku Oshiro and unveiled at the Milan furniture fair last spring, is a kidney-shaped unit with an integrated sink and cooktop, all carved from a single block of travertine. Its elegant, wave-shaped doors were particularly difficult to fabricate given the fragility of the stone. Danilo and his team went through multiple prototypes before finding a way to make the doors strong enough — a laborious, time-consuming process. “Everything we make is a prototype and our R&D is never-ending. Maybe that’s not good for business, in the sense of making money. But it’s good for creating something special.”
Just as lines of minerals run through the stones, respect for the materials runs through the veins of the Vasellis. “We live in Siena, where the buildings have existed for a millennium,” says Danilo. “It’s taken hundreds of thousands of years to make this stone, so we have to respect it. Our wish is that the client brings home something timeless.” 
Peter J. Frank is Further’s Deputy Editor.
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