london global city space postwar film modernist novel

In Greek mythology, to cross the waters of Lethe, Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon, and Cocytus, was to traverse the boundaries of life and death. Rivers have long been mythologized as the route to the underworld. It would be impossible to name all the interlappings of water and death.

Lethe, Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus… The feeling of vertigo and depth conjures the weight of all those cubic meters of water and mountain. Cold air rises from below as torrential sound draws your senses down.

Peering through the wire fence that encloses the walkway on top of the dam, it is impossible to see the bottom. Casting a great shadow into the ravine, Vajont now stands as a tomb to the megalomania of hydropower engineering. For the fathers of the dam, a masterpiece of Italy’s rapid post-war industrialization, Paolini stated that there is an eerie sense that the mountain collapsed, but the dam-sculpted to a morbid perfection-survived the ensuing landslide.

The elegance of its form acts as a strange premonition of the instability of Monte Toc its long history of landslides studied but ignored by the dam’s surveyors. Photographed in studio isolation, the model looks like a tsunami wave. Upstream, at the Erto Museum, there is a photograph of a scale model of the dam sculpted in clay. Photograph of a scale model of the Vajont dam at the Museo del Vajont. A wave 250 meters high jumped over the concrete wall, devastating Casso, Longarone, and other towns downstream, killing at least 2,500 people.

Its population was killed when at 10:39pm on October 9, 1963, 260 million cubic meters of mountainside descended from Monte Toc into the reservoir of the recently finished Vajont dam. We drive through a tunnel excavated to access the dam’s control buildings, and then wind our way up on foot to Casso, a ghost village above. Due to the booming popularity of the sparkling wine, water and soil have been exploited in the vineyards that spread across the drought-affected hills downstream. The Piave river links the Dolomites to Venice, two UNESCO heritage sites with a new one in the middle: Prosecco. The new town built in its place in the 1960s is a center for the manufacture of ice cream and sunglasses. Driving through the town of Longarone, I catch a glimpse of the concrete wall nestled within a narrow ravine on the other side of the valley.įrancesco, the Professor who is my guide, tells me that Longarone was destroyed.

London global city space postwar film modernist novel