It’s not long now. There will be lots of you and you can enjoy the landscape, actually you will be the landscape. Because the landscape only exists inside us, in our perception. Therefore, the natural landscape is a creative construction of ours and, through our actions, we determine what it is. For better or for worse. Taking part in the Maratona means constructing a beautiful landscape inside us and, for once, we switch off our car engines and switch on our desire for freedom.
The landscape isn’t mountains or flora (in Ladin ciüf means flowers) and it can’t have a definition circumscribed over time. When Horace wrote his Arcadian pastoral poetry, the Arcadia didn’t exist any longer. What did exist was a Sicily where armies of slaves grew grains to feed Rome, the capital of the world. What we simplistically call landscape is actually a set of living systems that evolves in a sort of continuous metamorphosis, taking with it human and natural conditions that are also continuously transforming. The landscape is us and what we do. Therefore, we are responsible for the landscape that we build, day after day.
Doesn’t the landscape include the sparrow praising the Lord with its solitary song on an isolated Swiss pine while making a mockery of the cyclist struggling up the Giau pass? And aren’t the horns that you can hear while walking through the woods part of the landscape?
We are landscape, we are flora.
Welcome to the 35th edition of the Maratona dles Dolomites - Enel. It’s great to have you here again, adding life to the landscape for a wonderful day.
michil costa
