Atlas Rocking Stone

Example of a huge boulder carried by the movement of glaciers to a place remote from its origin. Known as “erratics”, such boulders were used as decorative elements or building material. In the Larian area alone they were also used as tombs, termed massi avelli or boulder tombs. The “Pietra Pendula” is recognizable by the characteristic shape of the block of granite resting on a thin limestone base. “Alpine rocks of all kinds evidently torn from the mountains and carried further down, hundreds of miles away and left lying rugged and formless,” Antonio Stoppani, 19th century