Vagli Sotto

At the bottom of Lake Vagli there is a village. It was called Fabbriche di Careggine and it went under when the dam was built; since then it has come back to the light only a few times, and the last was in 1994, when the reservoir was emptied for maintenance work on the barrage. An arched bridge designed by Riccardo Morandi crosses the lake, and all around the mountain is cut open by the marble quarries, for years at the centre of a campaign to have them closed.

The church of Sant'Agostino is Romanesque, from the late eleventh century, and its apse carries a rare decoration: two superimposed rows of hanging arches. Inside, on the pillars, are two capitals of Apuan marble, one with a lion whose tail curls in a spiral, the other with a unicorn: they are the only pieces of marble in the whole building, and may come from another church. In the hamlets of Vagli Sopra and Roggio there are two marble altarpieces with the twelve apostles, and in both James the Less is missing: Saint Paul stands in his place. The first is signed by Giovanni Pietro da Carrara and dated 1485.