In 1979 the press secretary of the British embassy in Buenos Aires, Randoll Coate, woke from a dream where his friend, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had died. Writing to Susana Bombal (who had originally introduced them in the 1950s), he unveiled his idea: inspired by Borges’ short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, he vowed to create a labyrinth in his honour whenever the day came.
True to his word, after the writer’s death in 1986, the maze maker’s design came to life in Argentina. Due to its success, Borges’ widow Maria Kodama began to propose Coate’s project to places dear to the writer. Venice, itself a winding labyrinth of a city, held a special place in his heart.
Labirinto Borges at the Giorgio Cini Foundation
In 2011, twenty-five years after Borges' death, the labyrinth opened on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Set in a weathered cordon steel skeleton to protect it from the elements, vivid green boxwood plants wind in long articulated lines, revealing the form of an open book, the writer’s surname splayed out in elegant type on each 'page', mirrored and intertwined.
Looking closer, images emerge: a question mark, a cane, a pair of eyes. 'The labyrinth’s perimeter asks us with its symbols and signs to remember the reasons why it was planted,' says Pedro Memelsdorff, the musical director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation. '[It’s] a monumental tribute to Borges for the future and for future generations.' Today, forty years after the writer’s death, thanks to the generous support of PwC Italia the labyrinth has been fully restored.
Restoring the original maze
The Labirinto Borges under construction, 2011
'We might think of it as a mosaic, with the plants as the tiles that live or die,' says Renata Codello, the Secretary General of the Foundation. The process of creating and maintaining the maze is 'a constant action … always living and present.' 165 dead or severely damaged boxwood plants were removed, while the irrigation system responsible for maintaining the verdant green was inspected and repaired where faults were found. Only time will tell if the older plants accept the new ones; like a body after an organ transplant, things need to unite. In the 15 years since it was first planted change was inevitable, with this revisitation the 1,1150 metres of winding path have been trimmed and unified. Weeds painstakingly removed by hand, the soil revamped, refreshed, and enriched with additional fertilization.
Thanks to a collaboration with the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired, the restoration also includes the addition of a tactile map at the start of the maze. Borges lived for the last years of his life in darkness, his sight gradually deteriorating over time until he went blind at the age of 55. So this small but powerful gesture creates another moving link to the author, allowing visitors to understand the structure of the labyrinth and feel its twists and turns before they take that first step into the unknown, and experience it for themselves.
The Labyrinth is now open to the public
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