Hase (Giant Stuffed Bunny on Top of a Hill), Colletto Fava, Northern Piedmont Region, Italy

Hase/ Hare is a 55-meter long, 5-meter thick knitted bunny constructed by Vienna art collective ‘Gelitin’ on top of a hill called Colletto Fava, with the purpose of making its audience feel as tiny as Gulliver did in his Travels.

Made completely of fabric and straw, the giant stuffed bunny has been left there till it completely decays with the help of weather and the occasional gnawing cattle, it’s expected to be completely degraded by 2025.

Colletto Fava is a 1,600 metres (5,200 ft) hill near the village and ski-station of Artesina in the commune of Frabosa Sottana in the northern Piedmont region of Italy. Hikers are encouraged to climb over Hase and relax after a long trek, as long as the giant stuffed toy is still intact. You can reach Hase from the town of Artesina, Piedmont, in Tuscany, Northern Italy, else you can visit it virtually through Google Maps.

The giant pink bunny is property of the group of artists known as Gelitin. These four men come from Vienna, Austria and have made themselves famous by constructing absurd art projects. This bunny was five years in the making and was completed in 2005. The animal lays on its back and is about 200 feet long and six feet high on its sides. It is supposed to serve not only as a tourist attraction, but as a rest stop for hikers on the hill. The group predicts it will last until 2025, when "the pink puppet (made of straw-stuffed fabric) will be swallowed by the weather, devoured by cattle, completely erased by the weather and nature." This is how Gelitin describes what they have done here: "The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy. The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbit's body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines. Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside. Such is the happiness which made this rabbit. I love the rabbit the rabbit loves me." 

On the Train - on the Turin route - Savona, Mondovì is the nearest train station.

On a Plane - The closests international airports are Turino - 2 hours away by car, Genova - 2 hours away by car, Nice - 3 hours away by car.