Christo wants visitors to walk on water with ‘Floating Piers’, his latest epic, landscape-altering art installation

It’s taken nearly 2,000 years, but regular folks will soon get to feel what it is like to walk on water thanks to a project by the artist Christo, who may or may not have had his namesake in mind when envisioning his latest project: The Floating Piers.

“Any interpretation is legitimate,” Christo, 80, allowed graciously in an interview at the picturesque Lake Iseo in northern Italy where his 23rd large-scale installation is just a week and a half from opening.

Since November, Christo and his team have been overseeing the assembly and anchoring of 220,000 floating poly-ethylene cubes to create a 3km undulating runway connecting the mainland with a pair of islands.

“For the first time, for 16 days, from the 18th of June to July 3, they will walk on the water,” Christo said of the 2,000 residents of Monte Isolo, which is normally only accessible by boat.

The Floating Piers is expected to draw half a million visitors during the longest days of the year to northern Italy’s least-known big lake. That is considerably fewer than the 5 million who visited Christo’s and his late wife Jeanne-Claude’s famous Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin in 1995 and the 2 million who walked through their work The Gates in New York City’s Central Park in 2005, due largely to the relatively rural location.

The project still awaits a final touch: The application of deep yellow fabric that the artist promises will dramatically shift from nearly red to brilliant gold under the effects of light and humidity.