LOST PARADISE

 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, like the ones on the Pilate Lake (it is said that in its waters it arrived after a long journey the body of Pontius Pilate) and the Sibyl, as well as important battles of which it is still possible to find traces in the names and local traditions. The great Italian explorer Fosco Maraini in the 30s, defined Castelluccio di Norcia, with its karst plateaus, the place most similar to Tibet that can be find in Europe.
The genesis of the highlands of Castelluccio, located at 1350 meters above sea level, it dates back to about 1 million years ago when impressive tectonic movements caused a profound depression that first became a big lake, and then 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 (24 august and 30 October) brought to its knees the population and the local economy based substantially on pastoralism, on the cultivation of lentil and on tourism. The country it is now completely uninhabited. A ghost town that only the resilience of the local population keeps as far as possible in life. Through this work i want to investigate and reflect on relationship between man and nature in a magical place that is disappearing but that for centuries has guaranteed a 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 in a historical period in which human beings, limiting his vision to a futile anthropocentrism, deluded themself that it's possible to dominate nature, to be able to 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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