Nature's Creative Force

"There exist paths without travelers. Yet there are even more travelers who possess no paths," wrote Gustav Flaubert among those yellowed pages from post-revolutionary France's powder magazines.

Homo viator, the most complete expression of human wandering and that genealogy of ancient wayfarers who, since the beginning, have gazed at and coveted the horizon in those experiences manifesting themselves according to circular motions, in that geometric perfection reflected in the human soul through harmonious and disharmonious combinations of the mind.

The Castelluccio Plateau is a fault-line formation created by tectonic extension roughly one million years ago. Massive rock blocks separated and drifted apart, forming a vast depression. Sediments gradually accumulated, creating the current flat floor of the Great Plain, Small Plain, and Lost Plain.

Thus it becomes almost natural to shed the clothes of the tourist and don those of the traveler, of that eternally unsatisfied wandering spirit, capable of journeying through memory as through a fleeting instant, in a closed universe yet without boundaries. Experience and journey, terms that Western civilization delivers as an indivisible semantic pairing that seems to renew itself even in a common etymological origin.

Journeys relived on winding roads and pathways that become sanctuaries for pilgrims and wanderers, ancestral places transcending time and space capable of restoring to human wandering that intimate meaning dormant in the collective unconscious, that primitive sediment which is the strictest sense of human existence.

And it's precisely from a road, the Provincial Highway 477, that the ascent to the Castelluccio Plateau begins, a land that Fosco Maraini promptly defined as the place most similar to Tibet that exists in Europe. A vast depression generated by tectonic extension occurring roughly one million years ago has traced the profile of a land that reveals itself to be both human and wild.

The idea of a primitive nature plausibly recalling the inaccessible Amazon rainforest seems almost to relive in those rocky massifs, in those peaks suggesting to the human soul the direction to follow to elevate the spirit to a will-o'-the-wisp, an intangible entity capable of soaring beyond the peremptory ascending currents that chain the body to the ground. A land whose places seem to guard a double memory. One visible to all, and one silent, hidden, almost occult.

Lake Pilato sits at 1,941 meters above sea level in a glacier-carved basin on Mount Vettore, oriented north-south. Its shape and size vary according to precipitation and snowmelt. When water is abundant, the lake assumes an eyeglass shape, with a constriction created by slope debris.

Such is the case of Lake Pilato, located at 1,940 meters above sea level in the former polar circle of Mount Vettore, always the protagonist of a double existence. One that seems almost to identify itself in the heartbeat of a tightrope-walking crustacean, the Chirocephalus marchesonii, which lives in precarious balance between the risk of extinction and the hope of survival.

A slender glimmer of light in times of ruinous biodiversity loss. And one mysterious, almost mystical, animated by the shadows of sinister figures portrayed by folk tradition in the guise of fairies and sibyls. The fascination exerted by the cursed lake originates in the recesses of the human psyche where fears and superstitions dwell—the foundation of magic and the occult.

A body of water that, since the 1200s, has witnessed a continuous coming and going of magicians and necromancers. Restless forms of Dolomitic scenarios frame almost stony landscapes dominated by a village appearing almost sidereal in the snowy frost of the hill upon which it rises, Castelluccio, a lunar outpost of a peasant civilization whose presence can still be felt today. Places of the infinite and the unknown, of natural sinkholes leading to the center of the earth and marble staircases leading to heaven.

Between early June and mid-July, the Castelluccio Plateau witnesses an event of particular importance: The Flowering. For several weeks the chromatic monotony of the pasture is broken by a mosaic of colors, with variations in tones ranging from ochre yellow to red. The floral species coloring the Great Plain and Lost Plain during this period are innumerable: gentians, narcissus, violets, poppies, ranunculus, asphodels, Viola eugeniae, clovers, wood sorrel, and much more.

If infinity befits the monochrome, the Castelluccio Plateau escapes this cruel chromatic law.

Pastel tones that astonish with the lightness with which they manifest themselves seem almost to dissolve under the spring rain announcing the arrival of the Flowering, a triumph of colors and the ultimate result of the isolation and natural selection to which local flora has been subjected through annual agricultural activities.

A nature that differs from the titanic nature so dear to Romantics and from the dreamy nature of Arcadia, a nature that is sister to humanity, a Franciscan nature in the deepest sense of the term. Natura Naturans, the perpetual generative action of God that renders creation perfect, constantly accompanying its becoming according to the laws of its own rational necessity.

Paolo Aramini

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