The Apuan Alps

Today we drove up into the Apuan Alps, basically formed of limestone and the closely related marble.  Im my blip, taken from the outskirts of Stazzema, you can see some of the limestone crags, and lower down a small marble quarry.
I love limestone! My love started when I was still in my teens and started caving. Any cave of reasonable length or depth is found in limestone, so for me my love of those underground spaces, large, small, and minute, became entwined with a love of the rock that formed them.  There is also variety in limestone country with the gentle rolling hills of the Mendip hills in Somerset, the higher hills of South Wales and the spectacular karst of Yorkshire. Later I started rock climbing and down on the Dorset coast, or around the Gower peninsular I climbed on limestone.
As the picture shows it can be very vertical, but it is also a rough, granular rock giving good grip. In later years I flew a paraglider over the mountains around the Lasithi Plateau on Crete, and near the Dolomites - also very vertical and formed of my favourite rock. Limestone often forms spectacular gorges, so I enjoyed the Verdon and Ardeche Gorges in France,  and the Samaria gorge on Crete.
Strangely enough I ended up living in Sweden, a country with very few outcrops of limestone, and none of any depth. I found new loves, snow, and the granite peaks and fjords of Norway, but I’ll always keep a soft spot in my heart for limestone, the only rock formed from the skeletons of living organisms!  Marble? A posh form of limestone that has been metamorphosed by heat and pressure.  See Jan’s blip of some spectacular marble blocks just to the north of Pisa, taken on the way up to here.