Skate Spot Porn: Pietrasanta Skate Plaza

In tune with the QS tradition of taking off to Europe for the first weeks of June, office related tasks have been taking place in Italy for the past half week. The first day brought us to Pisa, from where we drove 45 minutes to the Pietrasanta Skate Plaza, a skatepark where every obstacle is made out of the world’s best marble.

The marble mined in the Apennine Mountains along the Tuscan coast of Italy is the marble they used for The Pantheon, Michelangelo’s David, and what your favorite rapper’s floors are provided that he’s not a liar (i.e. they’re probably from Home Depot.) The city of Pietrasanta, located at the bottom of the Apuan Alps, is half covered with marble studios, each of which have several acres of gated land displaying gigantic cubes of potential ledges.

Pietrasanta is a town of just over 20,000 people, so we’re talking like a regular day at Tompkins when there’s a box. In 2012, they had a measly 50,000 Euros (~$55,000) to build a skatepark, except instead of constructing the 11th worst park ever built, they came up with a creative solution. Through cooperation with the local government and the main staple of the local economy, Marco Morigi, a beacon of hope for forward-thinking skatepark designers, mulled through the marble yards in Pietrasanta, collecting donatable scraps of rock that could yield skateable obstacles. The 50,000 Euros would then only be spent on pouring the concrete for the floor, and for foundations under the marble.

The result is a creative (and cost-effective!) public space that feels very much like a wealthy D.I.Y. spot. Some of the quarterpipes are only two feet tall, but conjoin in a fun way reminiscent of your favorite concrete spot under a bridge. The ledges all go without saying: perfect. And the randomer parts of the design flow like rock versions of junk ramps. The only issue is that rolling up to bright white marble in the beaming sun takes a while for your eyes to adjust to :)

We had just got off a flight, so any semblance of #motivated skateboarding was not in the cards for anyone. (Who needs another shitty skatepark clip on the internet too yaknow?) The purpose of these posts is always just to raise awareness for some creative thinking when it comes to skateable public space — something inherently different from a caged-in California Skatepark. While this probably isn’t Tempelhof level of “holy shit wtf,” it’s a small town that seized the opportunity to save some money, and utilized resources from outside the box. I’m a colossal nerd but I think about what the city did with the BAM marble at least once a week.

Also on completely unrelated to this note but Italy-related note, after seeing it IRL, Torey Pudwill’s backside noseblunt on the Milan train station gate is one of the top ten most utterly fucked things ever done on a seven ply skateboard deck. You have to ollie up the curb a second-and-a-half before you hit the ledge if you’re going backside for regular, and it’s a good deal longer than the Flushing grate.

Past QS Travelouges: Yume Farm, Vieques, Copenhagen, San Juan, Tempelhof, Shenzhen, Barcelona