Swarms of people are gathering in Italy to walk on the water. The NewYorker artist Christo has adorned the Lake Iseo with an art installation draped in bright yellow fabric.
The attraction has garnered significant attention and has emerged as one of the most popular tourist spots in the country. Named The Floating Piers, the 4.5 km long artwork atop the Lake Iseo is receiving more than 200,000 visitors daily. This number is a hundred times greater than the population of the host town, Sulzano.
More than 620,000 people have already visited The Floating Piers in a mere week. The path is 16 meters wide and is draped in 700, 000 square meters of yellow buttercup fabric.
Christo’s creation is not an entirely new idea, in fact, the idea of The Floating Piers is as much as 50 years old. Originally, the idea was to be installed in the delta of Rio de la Plata, but the project never saw the daylight. Again, it was remodelled in 1995 and suggested for the Tokyo Bay and its artificial islands. Again, the missing permissions did not allow the idea to be realized.
The Floating Piers has been constructed with 200,000 modules of high-density polyethylene to allow it to handle the huge throngs of tourists and weather the rough climate.
Though the artist suggested that The Floating Piers be kept open 24 hours daily, the massive influx of tourists led to the closing of the installation on some specified days owing to the necessary maintenance.
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and his late wife Jeanne-Claude are celebrated artists, well-known for their large projects of land art.
