It’s August 23, 2023. The Vaia Dragon a Lavaronein Trentino, a symbol of rebirth and hope created by the Venetian sculptor Marco Martalar, – was swept away by the flames of an arson attack, whose anonymous culprit was never found. Less than a year after that fire, the Dragon is reborn in another splendid guise.
How trivial and useless it was to think that your fire could kill me.
If he spoke, the resurrected dragon of Vaia would surely use the words with which Marco Martalar, its sculptor, presents the rebirth of his creature from the ashes of the fire almost a year ago. The artist from Roana completed the remake of the work destroyed by unknown hands in Lavarone in just a few days, going far beyond expectations with a unique new design and broken records. In fact, we are talking about a sculpture that surpasses the previous one by several meters: to date the largest wooden dragon in the worldor with 16 meters of length and 7 of height. The entire dragon, of a much darker color than the other sculptures as 6 tons of charred wood were used, deliberately burned to combine it with the remains of the fire and bring with it the memory of what happened last summer, together with the roots of the Vaia storm.
This new Dragon – the artist specified – is not only a guardian as a reminder of the relationship between human beings and nature, but is a keeper of memory, of stories, a symbol of rebirth and resilience that reminds us how human beings should always remain humble before mother nature
Marco Martalar together with the “new” Vaia Dragon after the 2023 fire
But what is the Vaia Dragon?
The Vaia Dragon was a symbol of rebirth, of a mountain that suffered the violence of a storm that destroyed hundreds of thousands of trees in 2018, but which tenaciously managed to come back to life. For this reason, its destruction hurts even more and denotes, if the causes are proven to be malicious, even more the stupidity of those who started the fire. The Dragon was created in Lavarone by Marco Martalar. The artist completed the sculpture thanks to a precise technique: the dragon actually has a central skeleton, to which the recycled material of the storm Vaia. The structure was 6 m high and 7 m long, using 3,000 screws and 2,000 pieces of felled trees. The initial objective was to give new life to theHave del Prinzep, the tallest white fir in Europe (died in 2017), but then the project moved to enhancing the woods in general. Martalar then used wood entirely Untreated which had to be marked by time and atmospheric events, and then decompose naturally and not unfortunately maliciously (as is feared). In the first weekend of the inauguration of the structure, Drago Vaia achieved record numbers. To see the “wooden dragon higher of Europe” in fact, more than 1,000 visitors came.
The new Vaia Dragon appeared on the summer solstice
This dragon, extraordinary in its composition, was devastated by a fire one Friday in June which destroyed the entire structure in a very short time. For the community of Lavarone (in the province of Trento) it was a shock. In fact, the work had become a symbol of rebirth, a pilgrimage destination for many tourists and nature lovers and perhaps it is precisely because of the media attention aroused by the dragon that someone had thought of destroying it. A gesture of anger at the continuous influx of people in a previously unfrequented place such as the Magré area: we will probably never know, but what matters is that the dragon, as he himself explains sculptor “is reborn from his ashes”. Martalar, some time ago, had announced the return of the dragon with a wooden eggnow the egg has hatched, giving birth to an even more majestic and “scary” creature than before, a true guardian of the mountain with an extraordinary pose, almost in an attack position.
We can say that today (June 21st, ed.) the works are finished and Lavarone has its guardian again. It took ten months of work to create it and the work carries with it the memory of what happened to its predecessor. Inside there are not only the roots of the Vaia storm but there is also a part of the old dragon that was destroyed, while the other parts were deliberately charred and assembled together with the rest of the wood.
The work can be visited as early as Saturday 22 June, but the official inauguration (limited number) is scheduled for July 1st at 11. The Avez del Prinzep Committee which, through the Mayor of Lavarone Isacco Corradi, raised the funds, expresses its heartfelt thanks to the 1,650 people who contributed, to the companies who donated spontaneously to allow the rebirth of a work that has a significant very deep.
