Twenty years ago, it was only a shapeless cliff, which had the only aim to defend the outer breakwater from the sea’s wrath. Nowadays it is one of the most beautiful art galleries of Italy under the open sky.
It is the “Scogliera viva” of Caorle, the wonderful cliff which is composed of blocks of Euganean trachyte, that from the Sanctuary of Madonna dell’Angelo is present along the whole cost and reaches also the Cathedral’s square.
The merit is of Sergio Longo, a sculptor from Treviso, who made the stone of the cliff live again, and who was the first to know immediately the artistic value of this part of the coast. 1992 Longo, an artist who loved Caorle and its history, created through hammer and chisel the first sculpture that became the “Scogliera Viva.” Longo chose Neptune as protagonist: who is better than the God of the Sea in order to vitalize these stones, at the boundary between sea and land? The sculptor of Treviso decided to add a woman -a wonderful nymph -to Neptune.
These two works awakened interest in the inhabitants of Caorle and in the tourists and it was inevitable the start of an organizational project, which, thanks to the precious collaboration of Longo, favoured the creation of the first edition of the international symposium of the sculpture under the open ski “Scogliera Viva” during the summer of 1993.
Since 1993 many sculptors from all over the world (Ireland, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Israel and so on) and obviously also from Italy come here. Among the Italian ones, we have to mention some great names of the sculpture’s world, which realized some of the masterworks that are visible nowadays on the cliff of Caorle: in particular Licata, Celiberti and Voltolina. The themes of this long gallery under the open ski that is today composed of 100 figures are very different: from the mythology, to the love, from the natural and animal world, to the metaphysical one, from the real life to the human interiority.