Borges Labyrinth

The Borges Labyrinth garden-maze opened in 2011 in Venice's island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Dedicated to the Argentinian author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, it can be visited on one's own or – of course – with the aid of a tour guide who knows the way out. After all, as Jorge Luis Borges himself claimed, A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. The fantastic vegetable web is made up of 3,200 box trees, and branches out from a single exit route of over one kilometer. It was built by the Cini Foundation according to a design created by British architect Randoll Coate in the 1980s, in homage to the famous Buenos Aires native. The green labyrinth weaves in two opposite directions the word Borges and the symbols the poet held dearest: a stick, an hourglass, a tiger, and a question mark. Despite the structure's complexity, getting really lost here is almost impossible: the labyrinth is mostly an artistic symbol of how people in the 20th-century felt lost, abandoned because they lost a center to rely on, and mesmerized because they now saw reality as an indecipherable tangle.