Halloween landscapes

Well Halloween is not an Italian tradition. But till I was six I was a happy Canadian boy and still I have my skeleton suite. The celebration, however, is of celtic and pagan origins and Valtellina (SO) certainly has deep celtic roots.

The pictures I am publishing are from an obscure and misterious place in the Tovo S.Agata (Sondrio Valtellina Italy) mountain.

In the local oral tradition this was the place where witches and daemons had their sabbas . The paintings on the rocks are a trace of this ancient belief and maybe also a trace of the bloody hunt and destruction of the remaining local pagan culture operated by the Catholic church in the middle age.

For me it is one of the places where I took some of my first pictures when I was thirteen. Back in my youth I wanted to contribute to the preservation of this place so I invited here a couple of persons from the "belle arti" (an Italian institution for the preservation of Italian artistic resources). Those ones dated the paintings, which were in best conditions than today, to 1200/1300 A.D, and attributed them to the school of "Valorsa" and then, fortunately, forgot everything so they are still in place.

Those pictures are also part of a series I am preparing for a project called "Memory of the Mountain" that I hope will be in my ever near to be finished web site.