Ted Spears was clear when he enumerated the reasons the Sylacauga Arts Council put on its second annual Magic of Marble festival over the last two weeks. “Number one is to attract tourists to Sylacauga,” he said. “Number two is to make the people in Sylacauga aware of the importance of the marble companies that we have here.”

The festival appeared to be successful on both counts. It brought in sculptors and painters, writers and musicians, runners and walkers, the curious and the hungry. Everyone left satisfied and more knowledgeable about the miraculous white stone that lies under the town.

Some of it is hauled out in blocks to take living form under the sculptor’s hands. Some is cut into slabs to adorn buildings as walls, steps, hearths, floors and countertops. But most of it is ground to a powder for use in products such as paints, paper, plastics, toothpaste and as an inert filler in pills.

As a sculpting medium, Sylacauga marble rivals the fine Italian marbles that Michelangelo used. At this year’s festival, master sculptor Giovanni Balderi, of Pietrasanta, Italy, demonstrated his art to the amazement of an outdoor audience and taught aspiring sculptors how to work the stone.

Balderi has sculpted marble both from Sylacauga and from high in the mountains of Europe, and his finished pieces are displayed throughout the world.

“When you sculpt,” Balderi said, “you make your body in contact with your soul. When you first learn to sculpt, you don’t understand many questions. But when you learn the technique, when you are free to speak, you are entrusting your soul for understanding where you have been.”

His first project after arriving in Sylacauga was a mask, a face cut from stone, which he said he created to remind people of the freedoms that they have or do not have. “The mask represents what is possible for you with free speech,” he said. “You are free. You are living in a country where you are very free. But many times it is impossible to speak. In your soul and the soul of the people, it is important to remind of free expression.”

Ruth Cook, author of “A Brief History of Sylacauga Marble,” gave two lectures at the Comer Library during the festival. The book was commissioned by the Comer Library Foundation to commemorate the first marble festival. Cook’s continuing work will, in two or three years, produce a full history of the area’s marble industry, Spears said.

As for the industry’s future, Cook said there was plenty of marble left in the ground to keep it going for a long time. The bed of marble stretched 32 miles long and 1.5 miles wide.

“They say that we will still be pulling marble out of there for another 200 years,” she said.

If the city’s arts council can continue to put on festivals as fun and informative as the last two, they should continue to extol The Magic of Marble for as long as the stone lasts.