Lake ISEO, Italy

Vistors were walking on water experiencing Christo’s “Floating Piers” this summer.

- Lisa Wainwright

It is rather striking that part of Christo’s latest project, Floating Piers, a three-kilometer long, saffron walkway zigzagging across the cool waters of Lake Iseo, Italy, also wrapped around a private island owned by Beretta, one of the oldest active gun manufacturers, founded in the 16th century. Like that hippie image of a flower sticking out of the barrel of a gun, Christo unwittingly juxtaposed a spectacle of beauty with a source of mechanized violence that plagues contemporary life. But even with Beretta as a weird backdrop, to stroll along The Floating Piers, this past June, was to find respite from a world of news and work and ordinary life, and indulge in pure sensation. Christo has been perfecting this effect on viewers for almost 50 years of a career devoted to grand public enchantments.