Giovanni Montanaro has been sculpting for over 60 years. And his hands are strong, precise and skilled enough to create sculptures with perfect profiles that have earned him the nickname Michelangelo. For him, as for the company Belfiore Marmi where he works, marble has been a family business for four generations. A tradition that comes from afar and that keeps all the passion for working stone alive, from father to son. This is an exemplary collaboration that makes the Maestro and Belfiore Marmi a precious unicum, a priceless treasure of the ancient past that lives on in the present and soars between tradition and experimentation in a future entirely to be proposed, again and again. The history of this artisan practice and craft began in the 1920s in Castellana Grotte, a place characterised by a vast system of caves stretching for about three kilometres at an average depth of 70 metres, constituting one of the most striking aspects of Apulian karstification.

Between voids and solids, caves and quarries, the story of this company begins here, a company emanating hard work and knowledge, stone and water, power and chisel, art and people who govern it and who carve, change, wound stone day after day, with the knowledge of their tools and the gentle power of their hands. In the mind, heart and fingers of Michelangelo from Fasano, as in those of Belfiore now active in Fasano, even today, stone after stone, stonemason after stonemason, the motto is to innovate, to adapt to the times, to exploit technology, always availing themselves of the skilful hands of other industrious maestros, perhaps young industrious apprentices who continue to practise their art modelling marble, travertine, granite and composite materials.