ARPA DI PIETRA
a spectacle of grandeur...
Why such a particular name? We borrowed it from Aldo Gorfer, a Trentino landscape historian and author of “Terra mia”, where he describes the dry-stone wall terraces of Val di Gresta with these words:
“The stone harp is a spectacle of grandeur and a cross-section of universal history. It includes the sea, which about 200 million years ago allowed grey limestones to sediment; the subsequent volcanos, which inserted themselves among the limestones with pyroclastic rocks; the quaternary glaciers, which modelled the mount’s coast covering it with erratic boulders originating from the great Alps; the flowing waters and the landslides which perfected the modelling; humans, finally, whose stubborn intervention built the complex framework that supports the mountain’s exploitation system.
Walking here is like walking towards History. History has harmonized different eras projecting them onto the landscape. The landscape has become a cathedral.”
ALDO GORFER, TERRA MIA, 1980