Let's now move roughly 900 kilometres south-west. Across the Italian border. To a small town near Venice, where the rooftops are covered with red clay tiles and an old fortress looks down on them from a pine-covered hill. At the same time as the Copper Tower film crew was roaming the Tatras, one of its nine thousand inhabitants was a certain Giancarlo Tanzi. A young Italian who escaped at every free moment to the sun-bleached walls of the Dolomites, below which green meadows dotted with fuzzy edelweiss flowers fell away into the valleys. But he never fell in love with those heavy leather boots. Their weight only made the way to the summit longer and added beads of sweat to his brow. Still, nobody has ever achieved anything in the mountains with words alone. So the handy Giancarlo Tanzi began thinking about how to lighten the load on his feet. He sought out local shoemakers and talked them into experimenting with a material they had never used for boots before. Cordura – a light, tough fabric developed by DuPont during the Second World War for use in tyres, which later found its way into workwear and became the main construction material for backpacks.
Many prototypes ended up as worthless scrap. Then in 1975 Giancarlo Tanzi presented the world with the first hiking boots made from a combination of leather and Cordura. He called them Scout and, as a proud patriot, gave his newly founded company the same name as his home town – Asolo. With the hindsight of almost half a century, we now know his achievement deserves to be called revolutionary.
But the young Italian spotted another problem with mountain footwear. Moisture! Leather on its own, as long as it's kept well greased, won't let water through. But after the shoemaker's needle has done its work, the material is left full of unsealed holes. And just at the right moment, news reached the town of Asolo that an American company, W. L. Gore & Associates, had recently won a contract to produce a waterproof fabric for clothing for polar explorers preparing to cross Antarctica. Giancarlo Tanzi got hold of a few metres of the material, sold under the name Gore-Tex®, and began experimenting with the lining of the boots he was making. In 1980 – again under the Asolo brand – he launched the very first hiking boots with a waterproof, breathable membrane.
Let's move once more. But only a short way. Half an hour's drive east along the SS348 road, downstream along the Piave river, lies the small town of Nervesa della Battaglia. After the end of the Second World War, shoemaker Oreste Zanatta and his wife opened a small shoe shop here. Northern Italy, economically devastated by the global conflict, began to flourish rapidly after 1946, and with the demand for quality goods the business grew too, until Oreste gradually employed every member of the family. During the 1960s he handed the reins to his son Ambrosiano, who turned the small family business into a thriving company called Tecnica Group. You may know the name you've just read. Or at least it may ring a bell. Today, besides Tecnica outdoor and ski boots, Tecnica Group's portfolio includes the ski brands Nordica, Blizzard and Marker, Lowa hiking boots and Rollerblade inline skates.
1998 then became a turning point for two men living 30 kilometres apart. Both were tired of business. In the nineties, Giancarlo Tanzi was making specialist mountaineering boots from thermoplastic materials and, inspired by biomechanics, was striving for the closest possible harmony between boot and human foot. Ambrosiano Zanatta was a key manager of a footwear company employing hundreds of people around the world. The paths of the two entrepreneurs crossed when Ambrosiano sold his stake in Tecnica Group and his children Anna, Marco and Luca – the third generation of the Zanatta family – used their father's money to buy the Asolo brand from Giancarlo Tanzi.
The circle closed in the town of Nervesa della Battaglia, which became Asolo's headquarters. But the story goes on. Now with the fourth shoemaking generation of the Zanatta family, represented by Luca's daughter Ludovica. And old Mr Ambrosiano still walks the aisles between the stations of the production process, keeping an eye on the careful work of the Italian shoemakers. And although a revolution like the two that Giancarlo Tanzi sparked one after another in the footwear industry would be hard to repeat today, the whole Zanatta family keeps looking for further small improvements, from mountaineering to hiking boots. They all focus solely on work steeped in the scent of leather and mountains.
Right after the Zanatta family took over the Asolo brand, the siblings opened their own factory in Sibiu, Romania, so they could oversee every production step and the reliability of their boots. Specialist mountaineering models and prototypes are still developed and stitched in Nervesa della Battaglia in northern Italy. Over the last 20 years Asolo has introduced many small innovations that have earned awards from prestigious outdoor authorities and magazines. One of the most interesting is definitely the Micro Pulley System lacing, which makes your boots sit better and more precisely on your foot and stops the laces wearing through. The Zanatta family believes mountain boots are bought for decades, which is why Asolo takes old boots in for repair: for 2000 Kč it fits them with new soles, repairs the seams, replaces the laces, renews the waterproofing and returns them to their owner ready for many more years in the mountains.
