Alps Giants: the Monviso I

With this 1.7 Gigapixels VASTphoto I am pleased to present you a series of gigapixel photos dedicated to the Giants of the Italian Alps, very famous mountains that have made the history of world mountaineering and that every year attract thousands of fans from all over the world.

Let's start with one of the symbolic mountains of the region where I live, Piedmont.

The mountain is called Monviso.

Monviso (3,841 mt.) - also known as "The Stone King" - is the highest mountain in the Cottian Alps. The mountain is also well known because at its foot (in Pian del Re) there is the source of the river Po, the longest watercourse in Italy.

From 29 May 2013 it became a UNESCO heritage site. With a prominence of 2,062 meters, the tenth of the entire Alpine arc and the twenty-third in all of Europe, the mountain is clearly visible from practically the entire western Po Valley due to its pyramidal shape and its height of over 500 meters above the peaks. surrounding.

Did you know that there are well-founded possibilities that the Paramount Picture logo, the American film major, could have been inspired by the Piedmontese “King of stone”?

Lorenzo Ventavoli, film historian, declared a few years ago: «At the beginning of the 1900s many Italian directors moved to Berlin, while the workers of the sector landed mainly in the United States. It was one of these workers specialized in scenography, a Piedmontese emigrant, who submitted a draft of the Monviso to the creatives of Paramount ».

William Wadsworth Hodkinson, an American entrepreneur, became the largest distributor of films on the West Coast and in 1914 founded and became president of the first nationwide distribution company, Paramount Pictures Corporation. It was he, also in 1914, who designed the logo of the mountain that would become the symbol of Paramount.

According to American sources, the mountain of the logo designed by Hodkinson would be inspired by the Peruvian Artesonraju, according to others the Italian side of Monviso or the Pfeifferhorn in Utah.
But returning to the testimonies that have followed over the years, Flavio Russo, environmental writer from the Cuneo area, declared a few years ago: "There is an oral tradition on the subject but I also remember reading books by local historians".

According to these sources, two workers from Saluzzo who emigrated to America and were hired by Paramount, were asked to carry a billboard on which the production bosses had decided to outline the symbol of the film company. Russo says that one of the chiefs would have exclaimed: "And now how do we make this mountain?".

In response, one of the two workers would have pulled out of his pocket a photograph of Monviso, taken from his home and jealously kept as a precious memory of his land. And the logo was. Here it is, therefore, the birth of the brand that the production house used between 1914 and 1952 (called "First Majestic Mountain" with an interval in the Thirties characterized by another brand always very similar to Monviso), between 1952 and 1954 ("Twisted Mountain" version), and between 1954 and 1967 ("Vista Vision Mountain" version). A brand in which the 24 stars (which later became 22) that crown the top represented the actors (the stars) of the Hollywood team.