PARADISE LOST

 Along the Apennine ridge of central Italy, in the heart of the Sibillini Mountains National Park, there is a place that for its eternal charm and its strategic position has been the object of ancient and mysterious myths and legends, a place that the great Italian explorer Fosco Maraini in the 30s, defined  the place most similar to Tibet that can be find in Europe.
 The genesis of the highlands of Castelluccio, located 1350 meters above sea level, it dates back about 1 million years ago when impressive tectonic movements caused a  depression that first became a lake that after dried up, created the plateaus flanked by the top of Mount Vettore (2456 mt), the highest of the Sibillini Mountains. The village with its 1452 mt  was one of the highest inhabited centers of all the Apennines until 2016 when two devastating earthquakes totally destroyed the village and brought to its knees the population and the local economy based substantially on pastoralism, on the cultivation of lentil and tourism. Actually Castelluccio is completely uninhabited, a ghost village that only the resilience of the local population keeps alive. Through this work i want to reflect on relationship between human being and nature in a magical place that is disappearing but that for centuries has guaranteed an hard but symbiotic relationship between the earth and its inhabitants.
​ What emerges is the transience and fragility of human life compared to the immense force of nature, that on events considered catastrophic for the human being, bases instead his life and his own evolution. Unfortunately we live an historical period in which human beings, limiting his vision to a futile anthropocentrism, deluded themself that it's possible to dominate nature and overturn the imbalance that genetically characterizes its relationship with it. An attitude which does nothing but sharpen the dramatic consequences derived from the flow of events in geological history. There is an ancient poem Chinese that, in its simple but eternal verses, contains a truth that today seems forgotten, or at least remembered only in concomitance with natural catastrophic events for us: "Birds they disappeared in the sky and now even the last cloud has flown away. I sit together with the mountain, until only the mountain remains ".

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