Luca is a man on a seemingly impossible mission in northern Italy. In a land where natives love soccer, cycling and motorsports, Luca is on a quest to make pickleball the game of choice for Italians. Like most aging tennis players will attest, the satisfaction of swing, slice and smash without the shoulder strain, elbow stress and knee bends is addictive. The pick up culture is social. Anyone with any coordination at most any age can participate. The fountain of youth is a plastic wiffle ball and carbon paddle.
Luca brought pickleball to northern Italy three years ago after its explosive growth across the pond. The virus spread in the typical manner, converting under-utilized tennis courts into pickleball courts with portable nets and a piece of chalk to draw some lines. Sure enough, it caught on, first among ex-pats who knew the game, and seniors looking to stay active on a smaller court. Within three years he had six locations going in the Veneto region and a long list of players on the WhatsApp group chat and sign-up. That’s where we found him, on WhatsApp. And just like that, we were U.S. Ambassadors to the Northern Italy pickleball movement.
Pickleball has always been a game that encourages social play. Like pick-up hoops on city streets, pickleball culture is showing up at public parks and jumping in. Like Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in “White Men Can’t Jump,” it does help if you’ve got game. Fortunately one of us has Florida game, and in Florida, old men are weirdly awesome at pickleball. Three nights a week at a converted hockey rink in a mixed-sports park, we whooped it up with the pickleball acolytes that Luca had pulled together to strengthen Italian-American diplomacy.
Just like in the US, Italian pickleball is a lot of chatting mixed up with games to undici (11). Ron from Minnesota shared that in the three years since he relocated to Italy he has met more people from playing pickleball than anywhere else. Mayva, long-time resident originally from Canada opined that pickleball was the new international sport. We called the score in Italian, them in English, each of us practicing our numbers in our second language. The players were mixed in age from 20s to 70s, although it was reminiscent of Florida pickleball in 2018 when the best player in the world was 65 with the old guys playing at the higher levels. Now the top pickleball pros are teens. We told Vicenza’s top players and fellow Boomers to enjoy their moment at the top while it lasts.
Luca knows that Italy needs pickleball to do what it did in the U.S.; to blow up with the young people; to become the new date night. Maybe pickleball date nights will turn into true love and help address Italy’s birthrate problem? Right now, the Italian birthrate It is too low to sustain the country’s population. That is why you are seeing Italian One Dollar homes on Facebook: not enough new people. Italy builds homes to last hundreds of years but does not make enough Italian bambini to fill them. Is that the real reason for Luca’s love of pickleball or are we reaching? We communicate with him using Google Translate and WhatsApp so its possible that this is a Lost In Translation moment. Alora!
For more than two millennia, Italians have been building things in stone to last forever. Vicenza is famous for its buildings designed by the famous architect, Andrea Palladio. The most famous example of Palladian design in the U.S. is Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. You can check out on the back of a nickel. Those building are two-nickels a dozen in Vicenza. Even though they were put up without power tools or modern machinery more than five hundred years ago, they look good as new to our eye today.
A perfect example is the Colosseum in Rome which is still largely standing nearly two thousand years after being built. That is less surprising than the fact that the Italians seem to be building everything to last just as long. Homes are made out of concrete with window sills nearly a foot thick to match wall thickness. There is no drywall. There is no 2×4 lumber. There is no particle board. There is concrete, stone, and functional heavy shutters that give the homes a fortress appearance.
With suburban subdivisions and the Palladian Basilica both built to last a thousand years or more, Italy’s declining population is a problem. Like a good Ponzi scheme, much of Italy’s economy, and the world’s actually, depends on an ever increasing base of new customers/workers. If the base below is smaller than the pyramid above, the whole thing risks toppling over. It’s not obvious if AI and robots are going to save us from this predicament or be our demise. We think Luca knows what can work, and it’s pickleball Italian style, full of good conversation, a new customer base of young people, and maybe even romance.
Italy has expanded their legal immigration efforts to manage labor shortages and demographic challenges. Luca is betting that new Italians are going to want to get out three nights a week for meet and greet play. He is pouring new concrete pads in two suburban locations dedicated to pickleball courts vs. tennis or ice rick conversions. It’s a bold vision and we did our little part to support the “Save Italy with Pickleball” campaign that we are pretty sure, even though he didn’t exactly say so, is in the works.
Whether north of north in Whitehorse, or overseas in the Veneto region of Italy, we can attest that pickleball is alive and breaking down international borders. To be honest, the convert ice-rink court with flimsy nets in Vicenza as well as the busy gymnasium floor in Whitehorse give us new-found appreciation for how good we have it when not adventuring. We will continue to work on our social pickleball game at home because when you are an ambassador, its never all about the score. As with AI, it’s not clear that pickleball can solve all of the world’s geo-political, economic, and demographic problems, but it sure is a lot less dangerous and more fun.
