On the night of February 6, 2026, fire appeared in two Italian piazzas at the same instant: at the Arco della Pace in Milan and in Piazza Dibona in Cortina d'Ampezzo. No Olympics had lit two cauldrons at once before. The geometry of both came from a man who arrived in Milan in the 1480s and never stopped drawing.
Leonardo's Knots, Rendered in Aluminum
Leonardo da Vinci left knots everywhere: interlaced lines that loop through his paintings, his engravings and the margins of his notebooks, patterns with no beginning and no end. Much of that work happened in Milan. Leonardo spent nearly two decades in the city in the service of the Sforza court, painting The Last Supper and filling notebooks with machines nobody would build for centuries. He also wrote in those notebooks that where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.
Creative director Marco Balich, working with Lida Castelli and Paolo Fantin, took those knots as the starting point for the Milano Cortina cauldrons. The interwoven bands wrapping each flame are a direct homage. The designers added a second reference: the cauldrons honor the sun as the primary source of life, energy, and renewal.
Built by a Shipbuilder
The cauldrons were fabricated in partnership with Fincantieri, the Italian shipbuilding group. Each cauldron is built from aeronautical aluminum and assembled from 1,440 individual components moving on 244 pivot points. Closed, it measures 3.1 meters across. Open, 4.5.
The structure expands and contracts around the flame, a mechanical bloom the designers describe as marking the shift from day to night and the continuity of time. The fire itself burns inside a glass and metal enclosure at the center. Most Olympic cauldrons are sculptures. These were machines that had to keep working outdoors, in a northern Italian February, for the entire length of the Games.
Fire in the Piazza, Not the Stadium
Both cauldrons stood in open public space, not inside a ticketed venue. The Arco della Pace is a neoclassical arch at the edge of Milan's Parco Sempione, a place people cross on their evening walk. Piazza Dibona sits in the center of Cortina. Anyone could stand under the flame for free, any night of the Games.
Paris 2024 did something similar, floating its cauldron over the Tuileries garden, where crowds lined up to see it after hours. Milano Cortina doubled the idea, and Carlo Ratti, designer of the 2026 torch, built a traveling mini cauldron that displayed the flame as a spinning vertical vortex along the relay route.
A Flame Running on Renewables
The burners run on bio-LPG from Enilive's biorefinery in Gela, Sicily, produced from renewable feedstocks such as used cooking oil and agricultural residues. The relay's torch, Carlo Ratti's Essential, used the same approach; it is its own engineering story.
For sixteen days, the most watched flames in the world ran on what Italy's kitchens and farms threw away.
Lit by Skiers, Put Out Together
In Milan, Alberto Tomba and Deborah Compagnoni lit the cauldron together. In Cortina, Sofia Goggia lit hers in the middle of preparing for her own Olympic downhill. On February 22 the two flames went out at the same moment, closing the first twin-cauldron Games in history. Why two cauldrons at all gets a full article of its own.
LA's Turn in 2028
In 2028 Los Angeles builds its own, with the Coliseum cauldron of 1932 and 1984 behind it. I want to carry one segment of the relay that feeds it, somewhere between the beach and the stadium. If someone in your life should carry one too, nominate them.
