Fontana Il Tappeto Sospeso

Beside Cervia's salt warehouses, a mosaic carpet appears to hover above water. Conceived by poet Tonino Guerra and made from thousands of hand-cut tiles by Ravenna mosaicist Marco Bravura, the 1997 fountain folds the city's salt civilization into an image of flight.

Why it matters

Cervia commissioned the work for the third centenary of Cervia Nuova, the planned town raised on the dunes at the end of the seventeenth century so that salt workers could live clear of the marsh air. Rather than a statue or an obelisk, the city chose a poetic image: a carpet taking off, carrying on its back two mounds of salt. The choice says much about the place. Cervia has always preferred quiet symbols — the grain of salt, the reed bed, the small boat — over martial monuments, and Guerra, the Romagna poet and screenwriter best known for his work with Federico Fellini, gave those symbols a shape that neighbours the very warehouses where the salt was once stored.

What to notice

The mosaic rectangle, roughly three by five metres, appears suspended above its basin by water jets that resemble clouds. The shallow pool measures about forty centimetres. Marco Bravura and his daughter Dusciana cut each tessera by hand in marble and vitreous paste, echoing Ravenna's Byzantine mosaic tradition. At the centre of the carpet, two heaps of salt are rendered in marble and crystal; reeds along its edge refer to the vegetation of the former dunes and drainage channels. Guerra conceived the fountain as a poetic image of Cervia's salt civilization and the memory of its working landscape.

Context and history

The fountain belongs to celebrations in 1997 marking three hundred years since work began on Cervia Nuova in 1698. Guerra repeatedly gave form to the memory of Romagna's working landscapes; in Cervia he chose the flying carpet, a motif that recurs in his later public works. The collaboration with Marco Bravura links the project to Ravenna's living mosaic tradition. The Ecomuseo del Sale e del Mare includes the fountain in its literary interpretation of Cervia, drawing on Guerra's reading of the carpet as a vessel of memory for the salt landscape of beaches, dunes and birds.