The Old Striped Lighthouse of Lignano Sabbiadoro

In 1998, when authorities proposed demolishing Lignano Sabbiadoro’s 1928 lighthouse to make way for a newer model, local photographer Doriano Moro rallied the town’s defense, arguing that two lighthouses were better than none. He won, but with a catch: the old tower had to be stripped of its lantern and navigation equipment. It was repainted solid red instead, the same color as its new fiberglass twin, and stayed that way for nearly two decades. Only in 2016 did the town give it its candy-cane stripes, finally distinguishing it from its operational successor. Now the two stand side by side, one guiding ships, one guiding nothing, a bureaucratic compromise frozen in red and white.

Moro didn’t live to see the stripes. He led the fight as president of Lignano’s Fotocineclub, treating the tower less as a piece of navigation equipment than as a piece of the town’s identity, and he formally petitioned the region to spare it in February 1998. He died in 2014, two years before the paint job that finally gave his rescued lighthouse a look distinct from the one it was saved from resembling. The lighthouse got its second life. It just took the town twenty-six years to figure out what to do with it.