La Morgia and “Orizzonti”

A crag that legend says Samson carried here on his shoulders. In 1997 Costas Varotsos filled its wound with sheets of glass.

The story

Between Torricella Peligna and Gessopalena an enormous rock mass stands over the landscape: its name is La Morgia — a morgia is what such a crag is called locally. Legend has it that it was a spur of the Maiella which the biblical hero Samson, endowed with superhuman strength, carried on his shoulders to where it now stands. Samson then urinated, and so gave rise to the river Aventino. The figure of Samson is nothing other than the Christian transposition of Hercules, the pagan hero much venerated in this land of shepherds and farmers.

La Morgia was also used, until after the Second World War, as a limestone quarry; from that stone many of the houses destroyed by the Germans were rebuilt.

Filling a wound with glass

In 1997 La Morgia caught the attention of the Greek artist Costas Varotsos, who chose it as the site of his work “Orizzonti” (Horizons). At one end of the rock there is a break caused by the explosion of the charges used for quarrying: the artist filled the empty space with sheets of glass, making a wall able to withstand the weather. The result is an inverted triangle of blue-green.

The glass refracts the light according to where you stand, to the position of the sun or the moon, to the weather, taking on different looks and colours: green, blue, brilliant, colourless. In the collective imagination of the people of Abruzzo it is becoming the symbol of a region made at once of sea and mountain, of sky and earth.

Costas Varotsos

Costas Varotsos was born in Athens in 1955. In 1976 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and in 1978 he took a degree in architecture at the University of Pescara. He has received many awards for works now scattered all over the world and is a professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Among his best-known works is “L'Approdo” (The Landing), made at Otranto in 2012 and dedicated to migrants, in particular those who died in the sinking of the Albanian patrol boat on 28 March 1997: the work was made by reusing one of the “sea hulks”.