02. Sassi Grossi
In the Alpine landscape the boulder is associated with immobility. It lies on the ground as a stable presence, foreign to the brief time of human experience. Its mass suggests permanence. Its form seems to belong to a temporality broader than that of history.
The Giornico monument says the opposite.
A granite warrior pushes a boulder. The gesture is caught an instant before release: the body is tense, the stone is still motionless but about to go.
The monument does not celebrate a rock. It celebrates a throw.
It commemorates 28 December 1478, when the men of the Leventina and the Confederates defeated the army of the Duchy of Milan, according to tradition by rolling boulders down the slope. The battle takes its name from the stones, not from the men.
The competition was announced in 1929; in January 1930 the jury chose Pessina’s sketch from thirty-five entries, and only after many vicissitudes could the monument be built. It was inaugurated on 1 August 1937: eight years after the call.
Here the boulder takes a decisive step.
From painted image it becomes sculpted mass. It has real weight, occupies real space, you can walk around it.
But it remains a representation: a granite boulder depicting a boulder.
And above all it is a boulder stopped in motion.
Wagner had painted the fall. Pessina sculpts the instant before it, the moment when the stone is still motionless and already on its way. Two ways of solving the same problem: how to represent movement in an object that by definition does not move.
Here too the boulder is not an accessory element. It is not a detail of the landscape. It is the generating core of the work.
The stone matters not only for the form it has, but for the possibilities it contains. It can be obstacle, weapon, signal, shelter. It can belong to geology and to history at the same time. This is the ambivalence the boulder always carries with it: an apparently motionless presence that tells of a movement, a mass that keeps the memory of a displacement.
In Giornico this condition becomes visible through a historical event. The boulder ceases to be background.
Souvenir di montagna takes up the same condition and removes everything else. No warrior, no battle, no story. A polyhedron resting on one face, apparently ready to roll. Movement not as an episode, but as a potential state.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Apollonio Pessina (Ligornetto, 1879–1958), Monumento alla battaglia dei Sassi Grossi, granite. Giornico, Leventina Valley (TI), northern entrance to the village
Survey of the boulder’s profile, superimposed on the photograph. Ten vertices, angles between 101° and 169°: no right angle.
Tracing: Archivio Umberto Cavenago, 2026
Plaster model for the Monument to the Battle of the Sassi Grossi, inv. 697. Casa Pessina, Ligornetto. In the plaster the planes of the boulder are sharper than in the final granite.
In 1928, for the 450th anniversary of the battle, it was decided to commemorate the event with a monument. At that time “large commissions” were rare in Switzerland. Pessina, mainly engaged in funerary sculpture, was enthusiastic about creating a historical monument. The project was postponed, however, and took shape in 1929, when the competition brief was published in May in the Official Gazette of the Canton, no. 41. In January 1930 the jury made its final choice and opted for a sketch by Pessina.
In 1928, for the 450th anniversary of the battle, it was decided to commemorate the event with a monument. At that time “large commissions” were rare in Switzerland. Pessina, mainly engaged in funerary sculpture, was enthusiastic about creating a historical monument. The project was postponed, however, and took shape in 1929, when the competition brief was published in May in the Official Gazette of the Canton, no. 41. In January 1930 the jury made its final choice and opted for a sketch by Pessina.
The monument lit up. Raking light makes legible the planes that flat daylight cancels out.
Hypothetical three-dimensional reconstruction of Pessina’s boulder: wireframe, the drawing of the edges alone.
Drawing: Umberto Cavenago, 2025
Drawing: Umberto Cavenago, 2025