Giuliano Cecchinelli is seventy-nine years old, with a gray beard, wearing a dark plaid shirt and a floppy beret, which is characteristic of a trained sculptor. He has been working with stone since he was a boy in Italy.
“I know more than your cemetery appreciates,” he says as he walks through Hope Cemetery in Barre. “You know, the families, the workers.”
He is part of a long legacy of Italian stone carvers in Barre, craftsmen whose skill transformed an industry and made the small central Vermont town the “Granite Capital of the World.”
Hope Cemetery was established here at the turn of the 20th century when the first Italian stone carvers settled in the town. Many of them are laid to rest here, beneath the monuments they created.
“Those carvers way back then, they really had it,” Giuliano says while pointing at a tombstone. “They knew what the hell they were doing. Look at the waves, they look more realistic than the real thing!”
The stone carvers came from northern Italy, where there have been marble quarries for centuries. These craftsmen were among the best in the world.
In the late 1800s, some of them moved to southern Vermont to work in the thriving marble industry in Proctor.
When granite started being quarried in Barre, many of those sculptors relocated once again. The industry boomed, and stonecutters, sculptors, and quarrymen flocked to Barre from all over Europe.
In Hope Cemetery, I ask Giuliano if there are any tombstones he’s fond of.
“Yes,” he says, “many of them. As a matter of fact, if we walk over there, we’ll see one of the most famous ones, you know, Elia Corti, the man who got shot at the Labor Hall.”
Listen to oral histories of Barre from the Aldrich Public Library archives.
The Italian stoneworkers who arrived in Barre 140 years ago brought their families, their values, and their way of life. They built a community in the north end of town, made wine during Prohibition, established a mutual aid society, and built the Socialist Labor Party Hall.
In 1903, a man named Elia Corti was shot there. Now he sits in Hope Cemetery on a block of stone, chin in hand, with the tools of his trade nearby.
Giuliano points them out. “He was a sculptor,” he says. “Look at the pneumatic tool… a compass. That’s a caliper.”
In the early 20th century, Barre was a thriving industrial town. Thousands of workers spent their days creating monuments. The train transported them across the country. And stone dust filled the air: Back then, many of the sculptors developed silicosis, a condition caused by the particles that accumulated in their lungs.
Giuliano points to another sculpture—it depicts a man slumped back, with his eyes closed. A woman is next to him, her hand on his chest.
“There’s the Brusa monument,” he says. “The guy is dying of silica.”
But that happened in the past. Barre is no longer the bustling industrial town it once was. The stone industry has modernized and consolidated. The influx of immigrants has dwindled, and eventually ceased. The Italian sculptors have either passed away, retired, or moved away. And Giuliano is the last one remaining.
Originated from 30 generations regarding stone carvers
Giuliano lives in a brown house to the north of Barre. Art adorns the walls, and statues line the shelves. The coffee table in the living room is covered with bouquets of dried flowers.
We sit down in the kitchen, and he shows me his hands.
“See, they’re all deformed, look at each finger, they’re all different, there are calluses everywhere,” he says. “But I mean, what do you expect, you know?”
These hands have been carving stone for almost 75 years.
He started as a young boy in Carrara, Italy, a town on the Tuscan coast renowned for its marble. Michelangelo himself used to source stone from there. There are open quarries in the mountains there that make them look like they’re covered with snow.
“When I go back, what I miss is—you drive in the car, and you see these great big mountains, marble all over. You feel so overwhelmed, because no matter where you go, the actual thing is it,” he says.
Many of the craftsmen who came to Barre around the turn of the 19th century were from Carrara. The city is famous for its stone carvers. Giuliano’s father worked in marble, and his grandfather before that.
“We go about 15 generations back or more,” Giuliano says.
At the age of 13, Giuliano went to art school. In his first assignment in sculpture, he was told to make a cube.
“They give you a rough piece of stone, so naturally you have two straight edges, and then you make a parallel,” he says. “Then once you get one plane, you take a measurement, and you mark it, then you make a square. Make your corner, and then you know the plane.”
He says he had a natural ability to see these planes, the invisible grid that governs the laws of perspective, volume, light, and shadow.
“In art school, I had a professor, and he said, ‘I wish I had your eyes,'” Giuliano says.
Over the years, he learned the fundamentals of religious sculptures and the intricacies of portraiture—the anatomy of a hand, the taper of a perfect column.
In 1959, when Giuliano was a teenager, his father was offered a job at the Vermont Marble Company. He accepted it, and two years later, Giuliano and his mother joined him. Like the first Italian stone carvers almost a century before, they made the move from northern Italy to southern Vermont.
“I had no say, let’s put it this way, to come here,” Giuliano says. “I just followed my family because I was underage, I was 17.”
He learned English and spent the following years attending high school. In the afternoons and during the summers, he worked with his father at the Vermont Marble Company.
Giuliano graduated from Proctor High School in 1964. Next to his photo in the yearbook, he included a quote. It reads: “The glory and goodness of art.”
‘ The genius, not only a sculptor’
If you walk into the warehouse of Buttura & Gherardi Granite Artisans in Barre, employees transform chunks of granite into headstones. They cut them to size, engrave them, lift them with harnesses, and move them from place to place.
Beyond the production area, under the light of a floor lamp, is where you’ll find the last Italian stone carver in Stipe.
Giuliano is bent over a piece of stone, with a tool in his hand. He wields it as an extension of himself, and a face begins to emerge from the granite: a chin, a nose, two eyes. He’s carving a small bust, about five inches tall.
He usually works on commission, carving flowers, praying hands, and religious figures for tombstones. Sometimes, like today, he’ll come in to tinker. The stone in front of him is a scrap piece of granite, leftover from a headstone.
“They’re making things, but me, I know the lines,” he says. “I make it a whole thing.”
After Giuliano graduated from Proctor High School, he worked for a short time at the Vermont Marble Company. But he says they asked him to do things below the skill level he had shown them, so he quit.
“I, I said, ‘forward sure, but backward never,” Giuliano says. “So I called a friend of my father who lived in Stipe, and I said, ‘Can you find a place for me?’ He said, ‘Oh, no problem.'”
Giuliano got a job at what was then called Buttura and Sons, and just like Vermont’s first Italian stone carvers in the 1800s, he and his father made the move from Proctor to Barre and from marble to granite.
When he first arrived here, Giuliano was 22, the youngest Italian stone carver in town.
“All the Italians, we used to gather… We used to get downtown, sit around, and talk,” he recalls. “Nowadays, it doesn’t work that way, because there aren’t that many Italians anymore.”
By the time Giuliano moved in the mid-1960s, the Italian population in Barre was on the decline. It’s only dwindled further in the years since. And the granite industry has changed.
Mark Gherardi owns the business where Giuliano works and bought it in 2000.
“In the ’70s, there were probably 35 or so businesses in the greater Barre area,” he says. “Now there’s, you know, about maybe a little more than half of that.”
He says businesses have gotten bigger and fulfill more orders. Automation and computers have reduced the amount of labor they need to operate. Sculpture isn’t as popular as it used to be, and there aren’t many people left who know how to do it.
“We can do certain things on automated machines, but we can’t get that human element that a sculptor, a true good sculptor, can get,” Gherardi says. “So we know that we’re going to lose an art unless we can find some young guys to come into it.”
He doesn’t know what he’ll do when Giuliano is gone.
In the early years, Mark Gherardi worked with Giuliano, they got a commission for a monument for a young man who had passed away. The family wanted a bust and provided some photos to go by.
“He got done with the portrait and we’re all looking at it saying, ‘Wow, he did a super job.’ And they had the folks fly in to look at it,” Gherardi recalls. “And it was a mother and son, and they looked at it, and they were talking, and they’re going back and forth, and we’re thinking, ‘Oh, what’s going on here?’ And she says, ‘Well, do you like it?’ And she said, ‘It’s him. But the boy had happy eyes, not sad eyes.'”
Gherardi says he wasn’t sure if the fix could be made. But, “Giuliano said, ‘Give me 20 minutes.’ And we all walked away for 20 minutes. And we came back, and he had made happy eyes out of sad eyes.”
Gherardi adds, “That’s when I knew this guy was a genius, not just a sculptor.”
The last Italian language stone carver in Branche
When the landline in Giuliano’s kitchen rings, he answers.
“Actually, I’m giving an interview today,” he tells the caller. He hangs up and sits back down at the kitchen table. He resumes flipping through a three-ring binder of photographs and newspaper clippings.
One photo shows Giuliano in the 1980s, with thick hair and his signature beret, standing next to the model he made for the Italian-American stonecutter monument in downtown Barre.
Another shows him with his interpretation of Mr. Pickwick, the Charles Dickens character, which stands outside the library.
Giuliano’s parents moved back to Italy decades ago, but he stayed in Barre. He fell in love, got married, and had three children. He became well-known in town, and his talent gained renown in the granite industry.
He says he sometimes daydreams about the huge, marble-topped mountains of Carrara. He wonders, at times, what he’s doing here and what would have happened if he had gone somewhere else. But he stayed.
“I’m someone who takes whatever is in front of you,” he says. “It’s not that you desire, or you want to be. You take things as they come along, and you try to enjoy it.”
Giuliano lives alone in this house, with the art on the walls, the statues around. His wife, Julia, passed away in 2015. His children have grown and his health isn’t what it used to be. He could have retired years ago.
“But what can I say. Carving or sculpting is important to me,” he says. “I don’t know… that’s it. If something happened [and] they stopped quarrying the granite, I mean, what would I do?”
And as the decades passed, the youngest Italian stone carver in Barre became the last. There are others with Italian heritage working with granite, but as far as Giuliano knows, he’s living in the final chapter of a history that began over a century ago.
“We don’t know how long I’ll still be doing it,” he says. “As long as I wake up in the morning, I go to work.”
‘ We make the best of the particular happening’
Desire Cemetery is just down the road from Giuliano’s house. There are more than 10,000 monuments here, but just like you can identify someone’s handwriting, you can tell which statues are his.
“I have landscapes, I have portraitures, I have religious figures, I have a bit of everything. It’s all the profession that I learned and now I put them to use,” he says.
He walks up to a rough-hewn stone, where a young man in a military uniform sits with a cigarette. The figure of a young woman emerges from its smoke. They are crafted in perfect detail, from the gaze of their eyes to the folds of their clothes. And if it weren’t for the gray granite color of their skin, you might think they were alive.
Giuliano did this for a stone worker named Giuseppe Donati.
“He came to the United States with my father back in the late 1950s,” Giuliano says. “But you see how realistic? Like, I got that particular eye for it, you know.”
He walks around, showing off his other work. The granite biplane; a young girl in the arms of an angel; a giant pair of hands holding a bouquet of flowers.
He walks over to the stone that shows a man and a woman in long coats, standing pressed together. His arm is around her and she’s leaning into him. It’s made from a piece of granite that was cut wrong and would have been discarded.
“I think this is the best tombstone that there is in the whole damn cemetery,” he says. “Because it’s an original thing. It’s happening. And I love what is happening.”
He points out his own tombstone, which he made a few years ago. It’s unlike any of the others in Desire Cemetery. It’s rough-hewn and shows his wife, Julia, as a little girl, sitting barefoot beside Giuliano as a young man, who’s dragging a bundle of sticks.
“It’s my life, and her life also,” he says. “Another little known and overlooked fact, I have her ashes in the living room, that’s why I’ve got flowers all over the house.”
“Do you believe in God?” I ask him, this man who’s spent his life carving cemetery monuments.
“To tell you the truth, no,” he says. “I’m God. You’re God. Everybody’s God. Try to explain who God. Piece of grass is God. A bush. A flower. It’s all created by nature, and nature is God.”
Giuliano hates it when people clean the tombstones here. He prefers the dirt and lichen that slowly come to cover them and give depth to the designs. If it’s left untouched, his own stone will darken with age and exposure. Maybe 100 years from now, a tour guide could point to it and say, “That was the last Italian stone carver in Barre.”
But as far as Giuliano’s concerned, he doesn’t want to be remembered for anything. Like all the others before him, he’s left his mark.
“It’s all a story, like what you’re doing, you’re making a story of me!” he says. “It’s a story, that’s all.”
Anna has been effective for Vermont Public via 2019 by 2023 to be a reporter and even co-host of this daily reports podcast, Typically the Frequency.
