Luigi Lineri, The Man Who Collects And Categorizes Stones

Meet Luigi Lineri, the Italian collector who has been gathering and categorizing stones from the Adige River in Northern Italy for over 50 years. He painstakingly cleans, groups, and separates them into shapes, which positively festoon his home. Adorning three full large rooms, the thousands of river stones are sorted into shapes that resemble faces, animals, letters, and more. It’s a quirky and imaginative hobby or obsession, depending on how you look at it. As lovers of stone collecting, we’re intrigued, but probably won’t be wall mounting them anytime soon. Via Vintage.es   A translated quote from Lineri:

“Not so easy to pick up hundreds, thousands after having seen, touched, observed, chosen, loaded up, brought near, loved them…and not for a day or a month or a year but for almost forty years…for a spur, an instinct, a desire that are inexplicable, inscrutable, quite a madness because walking across the river Adige in an ordinary afternoon it may happen to you that your eyes don’t stop at the sunset or the water flowing or your emotions but, half serious half humourous, your eyes low and mingle with that silent stone-bed in a strange dialogue between man and stone, past and present and your heart may amaze in front of the repetition of some forms…it’s incredible this stone looks like the head of a sheep and this one too, and this one too…whereas these are woman bodies and birds and fish and these are faces, faces talking to you in windy words on the shingle of a river…and you convince yourself more and more each day that somebody in a past ordinary day sculptured those stones, gave them particular shapes while today they give you a sweet and tormented obsession and people’s astonishment astonishes you and you find incredible their incredulity but all the stones you’ll pick up, more and more and more, will finally convince them as well…”

 

By Moss & Fog Staff