During her 2013 trip in Rome, photographer Martina Maffini met a marble sculptor with a rare collection of ancient stones. For her Lost Marbles series Maffini shot the marbles on earthy color backgrounds, almost monochromatic, to keep the viewer attention only on the gems. Her main intention was to create a virtual collection to display and preserve them. The collector has been quarrying from the Mediterranean, Central Europe to Northern Africa and only a few of them are on the market or still mined.
“Rocks of different hardness and structure are often mislabeled in the current the terminology as Marbles.”