LUNA, situated on the sea-coast, in the neighbourhood of the modern Carrara, was anciently likewise Etruscan, and of importance to Rome on account of its excellent harbour. The whole coast of Etruria has but few harbours, and there is only one other at Populonia; but that of Luna had the advantage of being at once the nearest and very good. Before the Romans had formed a communication with Spain by land, the military communication with that country was kept up by means of the port of Luna; and the Romans had long been masters of the greater part of Spain, before the communication through Gaul was opened. Luna was also important on account of its quarries of white marble, called _marmor Lunense_. The Romans did not commence to work in marble till a very late period: before the time of Augustus it was not very extensively used, and he first erected buildings of native marble. During Cicero’s youth the Romans began to employ Carystian and Numidian (yellow) marble in private houses, no doubt, for small pillars; and in the time of Pompey, the use of foreign marble became a little more common. But in the reign of Augustus it became very general, whence marbles of every kind are found in the ruins; Carrara marble was employed in vast quantities, the white Pentelian was less common. After the time of Augustus, it was customary to use bricks for the internal parts of walls, and to cover or incrustate, as the Italians say, the outside with slabs of marble. At a later period of the empire this custom extended so far, that it became an indispensable luxury to cover the walls even of private houses with most costly kinds of marble. The temple of Apollo on the Palatine seems to have been constructed of solid Carrara marble. When the Romans advanced as far as Luna, the Etruscans were, probably, no longer masters of the place, but it seems to have belonged to the Ligurians. In the middle ages it was destroyed by the Saracens.