A yellow-orange line

A simple line belies an epic project.

For my first visit to The Floating Piers (Christo's latest monumental installation on Lake Iseo, Italy) I decided to walk the five kilometers from my hotel in Iseo to Sulzano, the launching point for the piers. That's a bit of a trek, but well worth the effort.  Not only did I get to see the Italian villages along the way, I also experienced the magic of the piers in surprising ways.

From a distance, the magic of The Floating Piers is already startling.  It first appears as a thin, yellow-orange line that impossibly supports thousands of people. The line alone is unbelievable.  But the discovery that there are hundreds of tiny people walking atop that line is breathtaking, partly for the beauty but mostly for the thrill-inducing realization that I'm about to trust my life to an artist. Considering the reliability of most artists, "terror-inducing" might be the better adjective.