About This Project

309. The Desert of the Tartars – Project

1976, bronze, h. 24 x 32 x 59 cm
Photo Mario Mulas

It was September 1941 and I was a lieutenant of the Alpine regiment, staying in Val Monastero. Together with my troops, we were building a military road which went from Tubre up to the ridge along which lay the border. From up there, almost from the boundary stone, I could see a foreign village far below. It was Müstair, surrounded by walls, with a Carolingian abbey (St John) and a fortified convent. I knew that name because I remembered that there, between 1890 and 1900, my father’s youngest sisters had gone to study German, going down by horse-carriage from the Stelvio pass. It was therefore in my small tent that I read The Desert of the Tartars for the first time at night by candle light. Since then, like an unfulfilled desire, I have wanted to know what the fortress of Buzzati was like. In my mind, I was constantly going back to his book to the point of almost identifying myself with that situation because of my state of mind and actual conditions at that time.
I read it again in 1976 and, like the first time but with even higher intensity and anxiety, I wanted to give a shape to that fortress where Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo lived for such a long time. That year, with no clear plan, I started to shape something using plaster of Paris without any real idea of what it was going to be like. Then, almost out of the blue, from a space which I imagined as a deserted land, the ghost of a building started to rise and became a defined shape in a very short time. Without doubt, what I had in front of me was the fortress which I had been looking for and which had been hiding in my mind for almost thirty years [M.N.].

In Progetti e luoghi immaginati, catalogue of the exhibition, Milano, Galleria Stendhal, March-April 1983; then Busto Arsizio, Galleria Bambaia, May-June 1983.