Sculptures in Costalta
Costalta is a hamlet of San Pietro di Cadore that immediately stands out: houses entirely made of wood built with the ancient blockbau technique, sloping roofs, an up and down of alleys on the slope of Monte Zovo.
In this context, for over twenty years, the wooden sculptures of local and international artists have taken place between the houses, along the streets, at the edge of the woods.
It’s not an open-air exhibition in the conventional sense — it’s a country that has chosen wood as its language and uses it to tell its story.
In Costalta, a small village nestled on the south-east slope of Mount Zovo, wood is not just matter: it is memory. Here, among the streets of the town, next to the wood of traditional houses, you will find that of contemporary sculptures that dialogue with the houses that house them.
This is the CostaltArte project, born in 2000 from a simple idea: to combine every ancient house with a wooden sculpture, in a sort of marriage between architecture and creativity, between the vestiges of the past and the hand of today’s artist.
The works were born over the years, in the heart of summer, in the week preceding the feast of the patron saint Sant’Anna: Italian and foreign sculptors worked the wood under the eyes of those who passed, then leaving their creation a few steps from the home for which it is intended. Different styles and sensibilities, united by the same warm and living material and the same Dolomite landscape.
The project is promoted by the Regola di Costalta, which also owns the works: like its woods and pastures, this artistic heritage is also inalienable and indivisible, guarded by the community and returned to who visits it. The search for artists and the organization of the initiatives are, on the other hand, taken care of by the CostaltArte Association.
The result is an open-air museum that knows no tickets or timetables: just get lost in the streets of Costalta, look up and let yourself be surprised, work after work, house after house.
Do you want to discover all the sculptures, the artists who signed them and the history of the project year after year?
Visit the www.costaltarte.it website
