The Errant Æsthete

A thrilling read with heart-stopping photography to match out of BLDGBLOG on the labyrinthian mountain fortifications used by the Austrians and Italians in World War One. The topography is death defying, the writing for the NY Times in 1916 by notable science fiction writer, H.G. Wells, acting as a war correspondent, is magnificent and detailed in chronicling mountain warfare as “three dimensional.” Geoff Manaugh’s write-up is as smart as the mountain trenches were crazy:

…the idea of the Alps being riddled with manmade caves and passages, with bunkers and tunnels, bristling with military architecture, even self-connected peak to peak by fortified bridges, the Great Moutain Wall of Northern Italy, architecture literally become mountainous, piled higher and higher upon itself forming new artificial peaks looking down on the fields and cities of Europe, that just fascinates me—not to mention the idea that you could travel up, and thus go further into history, discovering that the past has been buried above you, the geography of time topologically inverted.