Among the first to surf on the Romagna Riviera, he founded the SurfNews magazine and was one of the innovators of Italian wave surfing. Here is his story
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antonio_muglia
Italy, the nineties: football is the sport that counts and if young people want to find their soul mate they go to the disco, to the bar or to the wall, with their scooters parked and cigarettes lit. Throughout Italy, of course. Except the Romagna Riviera, where surfing was the hook of conquest. “I only recently discovered that ours Surf Reportthe answering machine system for knowing sea conditions, it was used by girls to find out where the surfers were,” he says Andrea Tazzari, 59 years old, visionary pioneer and innovator of Italian wave surfing. “I remember that I received a report from SIP (the old Telecom, ed): you have thousands of calls and your phone is always busy, what happens? But we were just about thirty surfers and I couldn’t explain those numbers. Only recently did I discover that there were so many girls interested in us, clogging up the line.”
surf report
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The story may appear intricate, but it is ultimately simple and has its roots in an area that Tazzari does not hesitate to define “the periphery of the periphery” of surfing: the stretch of coast of the upper Adriatic, from Casal Borsetti to the border with the Marche. A place that doesn’t get much right with the waves, but which instead, also thanks to people like him, and certainly to the creativity and desire to do typical of the Romagna people, has been the cultural cradle of a discipline that has now become Olympic. Just take as an example the Surf Report, a bulletin on weather conditions put together by Tazzari himself. A sort of voice messaging system that used an answering machine service. “I improvised Bernacca – says Tazzari a Active Journal – I kept an agenda with the information of all the swells, with very detailed technical and statistical details. On average, for example, I counted 100 days of surfing per year, 60 with the tablet and 40 with the long. We had therefore created a dedicated telephone line, with an answering machine that we updated every day, even several times a day depending on the situation. I recorded the bulletin personally, then also getting to the point and indicating the spots where they surfed. We also provided codes to surfers, who could also leave voicemails and say where they were surfing and what the conditions were.”
surf news
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An idea that continued until 1999 and then ended also due to the first weather systems which, timidly, could be consulted online. But this was only one of Tazzari’s many intuitions. Born and raised in Ravenna, The Mug it represents in all respects a fundamental piece if you want to learn the history of surfing in Italy. He laughs about it and says that she has impostor syndrome, and who now, after having lived and worked in India for about twenty years, enters the water and no one knows who he is. But Italian surfing culture was shaped thanks to its creature par excellence, the magazine SurfNews, a bimonthly paper that existed between 1994 and 2012. “It was born as the house organ of our club, the Riviera surf club, and I started publishing it in a very artisanal way. It was a black and white sheet of paper, photocopied, which I personally wrapped and sent to the members.” The magazine was conceived within the Danger Surf Area shop opened with Alex Cantelli, which also functioned as a meeting center for surfers and skaters, as well as being the operational base of the surf club, which later became PHYSICALthe Italian wave surfing federation, which was opposed (even conceptually) to Fisurf of Alessandro Dini, Maurizio Spinas and Carlo Piccinini. It was in one of those moments of “culture-crossing, of pollution of the two surf and skate scenes”, that they appeared Nik Zanella and Emiliano Mazzoni, still kids at the time. “I remember they saw the newspaper and said: what rubbish. And then I invited them to give me a hand.” Together with Zanella and Mazzoni, the first good with words and the second with the camera, and with the fundamental contribution of Angelo Mancaadvertising graphic designer, began to give life to the SurfNews glossy and in color which then arrived (with a circulation of up to 10,000 copies) in homes and surf shops throughout Italy completely free of charge. It was not the only magazine on the Italian scene, but it was the only one that had a cultural and in-depth slant. “It was innovative and linked to the world of soul surfing, it was a crazy product. And every year it got better,” recalls Tazzari. “Until the editorial growth, and the inevitable change, led me to reflect: I didn’t want to be caged by numbers, and at the same time I had discovered India: in 2003 I gave my 52% of the company to the kids to start a new life”.
Auroville
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The Mug leaves with a one-way ticket to Aurovillea town in Tamil Nadu, in India, to manage a communication project financed by UNESCO and the Indian government. “I brought an X Surfboard with me. I didn’t leave there for almost twenty years, starting over from scratch with a new idea, mainly focused on radio. I was light years away from the Italian scene, even though I was always reading SurfNews. I surfed, but my mind was focused on work or, again, on not getting cholera. Only after returning to Italy did I realize how this time served to reopen my eyes, to reset my values and bring them back to zero. It’s natural to ask what, and he doesn’t hold back. “I saw people like Alessandro Dini, with whom I don’t deny that there was hatred at the time. We had broken up in the worst way possible, but I went to visit him in Versilia and we hugged again. It was like seeing a war buddy again: the mere fact that we were both alive made us happy.”
taz&Gerby
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Tazzari, together with Dini and many others, was in fact also the growth driver of Italian surfing. Despite not being the first surfer on the Romagna coast, a record that belongs to Lodovico “Guancia” Baroncelli, immediately joined the first very small group and began producing boards, without knowing the slightest shaping rule. “I was struck by the film Big Wednesday, which I saw from the scaffolding of a construction site at Lido Spina to avoid paying for the ticket. Then, later, when I was already catching waves with the hauling rollers, together with Marco Gerbella, known as Gerby, and in Guancia, we bought 60 thousand lire of resin and polystyrene and between ’82 and ’83 we spent the winter shaping boards in my cellar, taking inspiration solely from a photograph in a magazine. That year I threw myself into the water and stood up, I don’t know by what miracle, because luck would have it that our boards were wide enough to glide.” A brand was created, Taz&Gerby – with the logo inspired by the legendary cartoon duo Tom&Jerry – who managed to sell 50 boards. Then came the shop, the Danger Surf Area with Cantelli. It was ’89, Tazzari was 26 years old and it was just the beginning of a story that would last a long time and that would change the way many boys and, as we have seen, also girls approached the sea.
reflections
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It is inevitable for him to also think about how Italian surfing has changed. “I feel responsible for the exponential growth he has had, but I have no unresolved issues, and I don’t even feel guilty,” he admits. “Probably, if I had been born in Sardinia or Calabria, where the waves really are, I would have only thought about surfing, about the recreational aspect. Instead the creative streak started.” And the evolution, the trends, the fashion that Italy seems to be dominated by? Tazzari has a precise idea. And the glass is half full. “I respect everyone, but certainly now I smile when I see all these very horny girls with yoga doing the sun salutation, because we put out our cigarettes on the rocks before going into the water. And with this I am not among those who say ‘before it was better’. I am happy to have lived that moment, but I find these arguments useless which lead us to rethink the expansion of the discipline on our coasts. If we had followed them, and they had actually been applied, surfing would probably never have left the Hawaii. The moment you plant something in the ground, you never know what will grow. So I think there will also be moments of desperation in which out-of-control surfers drop you badly, but who knows, maybe in twenty years we will discover that among these there was hidden a poet or an artist who will bring out the best of surfing, and he was the influencers we all hated.”
soul surfing
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Today’s Tazzari has however remained faithful to the mantra of the beginning. “I didn’t like racing and I don’t like it now either. If you only make a dancer do contests, he stops dancing. Surfing is an extremely artistic discipline and has an unmanageable aspect from a numbers point of view. They say ‘you won, you lost’: but I see it as a limitation on freedom, and the best thing about surfing is being satisfied with yourself.” Even the material aspect has little meaning. “I surfed for the first time in the early 1980s, but I have no objects that remind me of those moments. I took photos of friends, and those of mine are very few. I don’t even have a copy of SurfNews, and I only have one sticker left from that era.” So what’s left? “My board for entering the sea,” she says. “A 6’0. Like the years I’ll be turning in a few months”.
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