The original Italian name for a decorative marble with distinctive green and white stripes, quarried primarily in the Italian Alps.
From Italian cipollino, the diminutive of cipolla meaning 'onion,' because the stone's natural banding resembles onion layers. The term became standard in English through Italian Renaissance art and architecture.
The genius of calling it 'little onion' marble reveals how Renaissance artisans thought about stone—they saw it as something natural and layered, not just as inert material, and this poetic naming influenced how the entire art world talked about decorative stones.
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