A corn maze that changes every year: the Hort Labyrinth in the Marche region of Italy

A corn maze that changes every year. It is located in the Marche region, in Senigallia (although on a few occasions it has changed locations: Porto Recanati, Ancona, Ostra), and has now become, every year, a fixture for enthusiasts, tourists, and the curious. It is the Labyrinth of Hort, a cooperative society, founded in 2011 as a spin-off of the Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona, specializing in the provision of agronomic and natural environment services, for technical but also recreational and educational purposes. Hort thus deals with technical consulting in agronomy, but also with activities for schools, excursions, and summer centers, all designed for both adults and children. The corn maze, a play-educational attraction with a very low environmental impact, is a kind of flagship of Hort’s activities.

The first labyrinth dates back to 2012, when Hort decided to redesign a cornfield with a faithful, life-size reproduction of the perimeter of the basilica of Loreto: and just like in the church, one would enter through the main entrance and, going through the corridors of the maze, one had to find the exit. Since then, Hort’s labyrinth has become an annual event: each summer, the cooperative creates a different pattern and, between July and September, invites everyone to walk the maze in the cornfield. “Surrendering to the pleasure of getting lost,” Hort emphasizes.

Hort’s Labyrinth of

Hort’s Labyrinth of

The Labyrinth of Hort of

The Labyrinth of Hort of

The Labyrinth of Hort of

The cooperative has tried mazes inspired by the culture of the area each year. In 2013, the pattern traced the architecture of the Rocca Roveresca fortress in Senigallia. The following year, the “Labyrinth of the Duke” paid homage to the Marche city with a path inspired by the city’s city walls. In 2015, here instead was the labyrinth featuring the facade of Urbino’s Ducal Palace. Instead, in 2016 and 2017, radio and bicycles were honored, while in 2018 came the labyrinth honoring Gioacchino Rossini with a design inspired by La Gazza ladra and William Tell. And then again in 2019 the labyrinth on photography (Senigallia is in fact considered the city of photography: one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Mario Giacomelli, was from here), in 2020 the labyrinth for the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death that reproduced, in stylized forms, the little angels of the Sistine Madonna,

About 15,000 visitors challenge themselves each year to walk the labyrinth and find the exit: tourists and residents alike appreciate the amenity of the place, situated between hills and the sea, the complexity of the patterns, and the pleasure of getting lost among corn plants more than two meters tall. But the secret to the success of Hort’s labyrinths probably lies in the activities that the cooperative regularly organizes among the labyrinth’s meandering paths, such as games, theme nights, tastings and more. Some of these activities are permanent fixtures: for example, the Enigma trail, which for a surcharge over the normal ticket cost (in fact, entry into the labyrinth is paid for) allows visitors to take part in a team game, lasting about an hour and a half, whereby they challenge each other to find the clues before their rivals. While Enigma is a kind of escape room reserved for adults (it is also organized at night), the Treasure Hunt is the permanent activity reserved for children, who in teams with at least one adult will be called upon to solve riddles and find clues, again challenging the other teams. In addition, the games are often themed and involve the presence of figures who can help or hinder the contenders (for example, Fantastic Maze and Enchanted Maze where knights and princesses or generally fairy tale-inspired characters meet, or Hero’ s Maze with the presence of the most famous superheroes, and then again The Night of the Minotaur, an evening in which, being otherwise in a labyrinth, one can relive the adventure of Theseus challenging the minotaur, or the Labyrinth of Fear with a horror-themed path). And of course, the labyrinth is also bookable for team games. Then, once the summer season is over, the labyrinth reverts to being a cornfield ready for harvest (visitors are forbidden to pick the cobs).

But how do you draw a maze inside a cornfield? The Hort cooperative was not the first to introduce the ephemeral labyrinth (which originated in the United States in the 1980s as an idea of farms to attract tourists: in Italy the first ephemeral labyrinth was experimented in 2007 in Alfonsine, near Ravenna), but it is the first in Italy to have made this type of attraction structural (already the second edition, the one inspired by the Rocca Roveresca, had counted more than 8,000 visitors). The tracing methods were well summarized in an article, published in MediaGeo, by Massimiliano Toppi, Giorgia Pandolfi and Francesca Massetani, who moreover called the Labyrinth of Hort “one of the most brilliant entrepreneurial initiatives in the regional territory and one that garners unanimous approval from the world of local institutions and the many tourists who flock to the ’velvet beach’ and its hinterland in the summer season.” Until 2016, the layout was made with traditional techniques: squared alignments made with ancient tools such as the land surveyor’s squadron and the metric string , which allow taking measurements of the field. A long and laborious work and not very suitable for complex patterns.

Meanders ofof Hort

It was precisely the increasing complexity of the project that prompted Hort, Toppi, Pandolfi and Massetani explain, to “look for new solutions for the implementation of the field tracing, and they triggered the need to start a collaboration with a topographic instrumentation company.” The company in question is Topcon , which has proposed an innovation: using GPS to track the maze pattern. A georeferenced schematic is then developed within a graphics program, which is then brought back to the field through instruments such as handheld receivers and controllers. “For the field transposition of the corn maze path,” explains Francesca Massetani, Hort’s technical manager, “the company sought an innovative method that would avoid the initial squaring operations with optical instruments and speed up the manual tracking of the paths, replacing measurements by metric wheel, with staking by GPS. This resulted in advantages in terms of time and accuracy especially in the transposition of long stretches, in which any manual errors would be amplified. In addition, the solution made it easy to use all areas of the field, even those where corn planting does not follow a regular direction, and to make more complex shapes. Finally, a desirable improvement would lie in the possibility of directly guiding the operations of path making, overcoming the intermediate stage of staking and tracking.”

So it can be said that in the Marche region, for more than ten years, there has been a kind of amusement park made with low costs, and with reduced environmental impact, which thanks to a simple, but fascinating idea and communicated in an extremely effective way (Hort is in fact very active on social media and often organizes ad hoc video and photo campaigns to illustrate the wonders of its labyrinth), has become one of the top summer attractions in the area, combining fun, culture, and respect for the environment.

A corn maze that changes every year: the Hort Labyrinth in the Marche region of Italy

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