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.