Note 72 — Chapter I

‘Cipollino’ marble, a very familiar material, receives its name from ‘cipolla,’ an onion, but there is a curious divergence of opinion as to the reason of the appellation. (1) The onion colour the marble shows in many specimens; (2) the onion-like shape of the large bossy markings which occur in the marble; (3) the fact that it is disposed to scale away under the influence of the weather like the coats of an onion; and (4) the concentric curves in which the edges of these coats are seen to lie in a section across the grain, have all been adduced as explanatory of the name. Herrmann in his Steinbruchindustrie, Berlin, 1899, p. 68, pronounces for the third, and this is also the opinion of Corsi, who says, Pietre Antiche, p. 97, ‘gli scarpellini lo conoscono sotto il nome di cipollino, per la ragione che, trovandosi fra la sostanza calcare di tel marmo lunghi e spessi strati di mica, facilmente su tali strati si divide a somiglianza della cipolla.’ Zirkel however, in his Lehrbuch der Petrographie, Leipzig, 1894, III, 452, pronounces for the fourth, which seems on the whole the one to be preferred. There are two cipollino columns standing in the Roman Forum a little to the east of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, famous for its monoliths of this same marble, that in the concentric wavy lines marking the alternate layers in the stone remind us curiously of an onion cut in half. See for a specimen H on the Frontispiece.