VSTR

In mid 2009, I got a rogue message from a surfer named Davide Pecchi from Tuscany. He’d seen Litmus in the late ’90s. He’d since been into quiver use. He’d now seen a free-friction clip and suggested with bizarro logic that I visit his Italian backyard. I’d surfed enough good waves, he figured, and I could do him a finless board in the process.

In mid 2011 my girlfriend was doing thesis work on comparative Italian surf culture. And I got to thinking.

Here sits a sea culture with written philosophical roots stemming from Homer over 2,500 years ago and in parts of the Mediterranean little changed, where waves and currents can be as fierce as on many ocean bearing coastlines, yet wave riding is a more recent national phenomenon than elsewhere. Surfer attitudes were going to be different.

I took David up on his invitation. It was meant to be a reverse surfing experience after three weeks in honking South Africa, a hot flat summer traversing the coasts of Italy. So it played out, albeit in far from expected light. If anyone could possibly have been used to demonstrate the passion and madness of the Italian surfer, it ended up being David Pecchi. What we found left us in the full realization that classic surf was far from the “be all, end all” of the surfing experience. We found surf subculture thriving, if not blazing away, in some sort of lost core against an ugly top heavy floating mainstream of kooks and crowds and no where much to surf.

The core sat 40 years back in time—Byron Bay or San Diego, 1971. Looking back on it, I still marvel at this great collective. These guys have something major going on in their respective microclimates. If I’d had 10 deep talks with surfers over the past 10 years, five came from Italy in the space of three weeks.

Through the course of interviews, every subject—an unheard of 100% of broad sampling from east coast to west as well as Sardinia—raised focal points that stayed on theme. The Italian surfing experience was finite. It was under threat by mainstream surf culture. Unless sense prevailed in such limited environment, escape was the logical alternative.

Lufthansa had lost our boards for the second straight trip, which didn’t matter much inside Aeroporto Marco Polo in Venice. There was no surf in the Mediterranean anyway, especially in high summer. But soon enough we learned about the distant Mistral. It was 9:00 p.m. The wind was 40 knots at the French-Italian border with a fetch aimed at a particular island from dawn to dusk next day. If we were going to get any surf in the next three weeks, here it was.

We booked an early morning flight from an airport 150 miles away. In my case, minus boards. There was nothing to borrow. I had to find an old board to recycle somewhere. Anything, when remodelled, could work without fins. At midnight we met Roberto Bacchereti in the surf town of Cervia. Self taught as a resin chemist, at 1:00 a.m. he opened his SurfLab factory and donated a board to strip back: thick, straight, and 23 wide. One consequence of finless surfing is that any board can be recycled. At dawn it was wet but set to go as a free friction unit. We made the flight out and found eventual afternoon surf akin to the lefts/rights of overhead Steamer Lane. Sure, we-got-surf, but the bigger thread started streaming from surfers and didn’t let up for three weeks.

This vast surfing space, the most constricted anywhere, feeds a sea of voice. Italian surfers have a coastline of 5,000 miles yet are surf-starved, location-blocked, wage-limited, road-wracked, crowd-squeezed, family-pressured. Their winters can approach the worst of the Great Lakes. Their summers fester in doldrums. The combined effect in the face of physical limitation and cultural invasion, whether invoking the wisdom of Homer or not, leaves a throwback subculture collectively tuned in.

“No one know it was possible to surf in Italy…now there are between 30,000 and 50,000 people in Italy who have surfed.”
—Emiliano Mazzoni, Argenta, east coast, graphic designer and photographer

“I dream of a time machine going back 40 years to ride my point alone. The trip isn’t always to go overseas and experience new culture. It is to change the mind, change the attitude. I give advice against fashion in a country where fashion comes before anything. I no fashionista or pumping guy, I just have a little bit awareness to be a respectful…I don’t want blending money and surf. I don’t understand the contrast of new soul surfer. Making the money and keeping the secret.”
—Davide Pecchi, Castiglione della Pescaia, west coast, lifeguard

“There should be no Net devices for the surfer. People should learn about weather systems. I wake up before sunrise. I feel the morning. I run to the beach and use muscle energy, I pick up the rubbish of people. I build my own things. I have no car. I use writing to share things and hopefully make change.”
—Winki Perdichizzi, Putzu Idu, Sardinia, writer/diver/woodworker

“My surf store H2O was one of the first surf shops in Italy. I sold to the first surfers. After 20 years the style of surfer changed. I was fed up with those people coming into my store wanting a 6’2”. I would listen to them and their story and bullshit and say, ‘No, you need an 8’2”’. Or they’d say, ‘I want a red wetsuit with stripes’ and I’d let them know, ‘No, you need a black wetsuit with no stripes’. Surfing was coming from one direction. It wasn’t my direction. I closed the shop. Now I have a fine restaurant. My work is respected. Last night I had 150 guests. They eat what I suggest.”
—Fabio Ciocarri, Ostia, west coast, restauranteur

“I am not poisoned by the fashion. There are those who buy SURFER to look at, not to read or to learn. The market is pushing the fashion not the knowledge or the story. There is much jealousy if one guy has, say, a pink wetsuit, and the other guy does not. To go to the discoteque to show off the bag is not the spirit. It is about the surfer, not the dress. I paddle out and the first wave I touch it, big or tiny, to wash my face and taste the temperature.”
—Pietro Ancarani. Cervia, east coast, café owner

—Massimo Tavani, Cesenatico, east coast, lifeguard

“On the other coast there can be swells of two hours. Here on the east coast it can be two minutes. If you miss waves here you are fucked. I was told to get out of the water in Rivenna by someone who had been my close surfing friend in Sri Lanka where he used to come to my place to smoke joints and laugh and have fun all day. I have not gone back. If I cannot go surfing in one or two places here, I cannot go surfing anywhere…so I keep the memory of the last wave I surfed on Maui and so not surf in Italy otherwise the last picture in my brain disappears.”
—Alberto Ricci. Rimini., east coast, shell fisherman

“Some arrogance lives here because people get greedy and territorial. I am not a good surfer but I dream of it. I practice to be good enough to sit on the main peak with my new friends. Now I am surfing a little down the beach. If you are no good they yell or spray you. Also if you are too good they can break your window.”
—Mario Cantanzani, Anzio, east coast, mechanic

“I was in the Italian Marines for two years in Somalia and Afghanistan. I signed off from my tour. When I returned I saw the World Military Games in Rome and went to the coast and saw the surfing. I was amazed and curious. I took my leave on Sardinia. I could not judge size or power of waves. I learnt the hard way. After three months my time came to be accepted into the force in a dedicated career. It was a big moment for me and my family. On the morning of the day I met my commanding officer to sign my professional life to the Marines. The papers were ready. There was tension. I told him that I could not do this and that I would dedicate my life to surfing.”
—Bebo Pulisci, Oristano, Sardinia, cellphone salesman/technician

“I was playing small professional football four divisions below Serie A as a teenager. I was called by a bigger club to join a pre season camp. It was a strong opportunity. I said ok to this, but then I remembered that the Canary Islands, my first surf trip to the ocean, was planned at the same time with a friend. I told them No. My parents asked, ‘Why would you do a thing like this after playing football all your life?”
—Roberto Bacchereti, Bellaria, east coast, hotel manager and surfboard builder

“All my life it’s my dream to surf every day. My family is scared for my future because I didn’t finish school. I try to make my own world. I don’t play soccer. I don’t have a normal job. In Italy it is not easy to be a surfer. It is another culture. There is only one way to surf every day. Leave.”
—Alessandro Ponzanelli, Pietrasanta, west coast, sponsored longboarder and shaper

“As a surfer you are living the experience that nobody else can live. We have so many shitty waves that when the waves are good the experience is amazing. Surfing is a way to enter a level of culture.”
—Francesco Pia, Venice, east coast, graphic designer

“There is a place we found on an isolated coast where a fisherman watched us ride hollow point waves in a storm that blocked the small harbour. His family and ancestors had lived here for long centuries, seeing the same cycles of the sea. He saw us on the waves and marvelled. He didn’t know surfing was possible. He had jumped off cliffs for fun in his young years, and told us of all the storms through all his years watching this perfect wave. He would have been a surfer if he known such a thing was possible.”
—Nicola Zanella, Ravenna, east coast, editor and Mandarin academic

Posted by: Derek Hynd