Antarctica

With its endless polar ripples, Antarctica evokes the crystalline beauty of sunlit glaciers. A spectacle of contrasts with a painterly effect, creating suggestive dynamism between grooves and ridges, woven into a fabulous and awe-inspiring atmosphere. Glaciers, extraordinary evokers of supernatural powers, have always fertilized the imagination of artists.

Take, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley with his ode "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni," composed in 1816 during what historians of the time would later remember as the "Year Without a Summer" (Eighteen hundred and froze to death).

Antarctica has sparked fervent interest for centuries due to the development of imaginative theories that view the Earth's poles as gateways to underground worlds and lost civilizations. From Edgar Allan Poe to Miguel Serrano and Howard Phillips Lovecraft—just to name a few of the most well-known—stories about Antarctic mysteries reached their peak in the first half of the twentieth century.

Among these, the most "colorful" is undoubtedly "A Description of Rainbow City - From The Hefferlin Manuscript," first appearing in 1946 in the magazine Amazing Stories. The authors of the account, the Hefferlin spouses, described an ancient alien city, Rainbow City, hidden at the South Pole and characterized by buildings made of colored plastic, rendered inaccessible by a powerful curtain of ice.

When you see a flying saucer, know that most of the time it comes straight from Rainbow City!