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What's "Piloton"? It's an ancient roman stone on a hill near Verona.
It seems a menhir, but the original function isn't been detected.
The position is spectacular: it's on the Preafita hill ridge, after Montorio medieval Castle and after Fort John; from there you can get a wonderful landscape.
It remembers the Kubrik's monolith although the surface isn't so perfect, even more so in the last years it's visited every June 24, in early morning, by people waiting the dawn, when the sun borns.
Why it happens? Why do they do this?
To find out, we must take a step back in time, in the middle of the last century.
There was in Verona a reserchear, Umberto Grancelli, who wrote two books: "Il mistero di Verona Romana" ("The mystery of Roman Verona") and "L'impianto di fondazione di Verona Romana" ("The foundation plant of Roman Verona").
He wrote in these books a theory about the foundation plant: he said that it was calculated starting from a tank located on the Verona hill, over the Roman Theatre.
The shape of the plan of the town is like a house with the top on the hill. The vertical axis extended toward North East arrives to the Piloton,
and keeping on the same direction it arrives on the point where the sun raises on June 24.
Both the books start from two documents: the Iconografia rateriana, an old image of Verona,
the original is from the begininng of the 10th century, now we have a copy made by Scipione Maffei of the 18th century, and the second one is
"Versus de Verona" or "Rhythmus Pipinianus (Ritmo Pipiniano)",
an old poem which describes how Verona is very beatiful. Both documents describe a labyrinth ("De summo montis Castrum prospectat in urbem / daedalea factum arte viisque tetris",
"Habet altuin laberintum magnum per circuitum,") and some temples.
But this is another story that I'll write in another section.
Coming back to our piloton, I've taken it mainly as a symbol: it is on the the hill watching around, so at the same way I'm watching around between books and holiday photos.
But at the same time I like jokes: I found another alignment more than Grancelli, by Google Maps.
If we watch the firts alignment, there is an orthogonal line passing through the Piloton: it starts from the "Fontana delle streghe" (Witches spring) and arrive to an obelisk in Montorio square.
It's a joke of course: I suppose it's a coincidence, but now we can feel like Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon.
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