HUGE MARBLE COLUMN

Hokitika Guardian, 27 June 1929, Page 2

HUGE MARBLE COLUMN

ITALIAN FEAT RECALLS THAT OF EGYPTIANS. (United Prees Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright). LONDON, June 24. The correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian” at Carrara states that the famous marble monolith, sixty feet tall and weighing 380 tons, which was cut out of the Carrara marble quarry a year ago, was launched to-day oil a specially designed raft to be shipped to the mouth of the Tiber to await a full tide in the autumn. It will be erected in the now foruiji dedicated to the I>uee and will be called Colonua Mussolini. It has taken a year to bring the great column thirty miles from the quarry. It was encased in a wooden structure, and for parts of the journey was moved on ' rollers, large logs of wood that wore placed underneath. Sometimes it was launched on n swift mountain torrent, and sometimes it was drawn by a hundred oxen along stoop mountain roads. It was an engineering feat only equalled by the removal from Egypt of Cleopatra’s Needle to the Thames Embankment. It is the largest and most beautiful column ever quarried in Italy. It is of pale grey hue.

There are two obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles; one is in London on tlie Thames 'Embankment, and the other in New York. Mehemet Ali, Turkish Governor of Egypt, presented the obelisk to the English Government in 1819, hut it was not until 1878 that arrangements could lie made to move the huge mass of stone. It was necessary to have the ship that conveyed it to England reconstructed in order to accommodate the monument’s length and weight.