I have a pair of Vibram soles on my walking boots and so I can attest to their sturdiness. When I bought them, a long way from Italy, I didn’t know they were Italian until their arrival in Italy when people asked me if I’d bought my boots over here (the answer was no as they’d already done a couple of hundred kilometres across the Snowy Mountains in Australia).

These aren’t just any soles and mine have been trooped about all over the place and are still in really good nick. For more than 70 years Vibram has been making these soles after the pioneering work of alpinist Vitale Bramani. In 1935 Bramani was part of a disastrous expedition in which six climbers lost their lives on the Punta Rasica peak, in the Alpi Occidentali due to the cold.

In those days the technology was virtually pre-historic compared to what we have today. The expedition was hit by a snow gale and the climbers found themselves without the heavier shoes they had left at the bottom of the slope to pick up on the way back.

Bramani understood how inadequate their equipment was in this case and decided to develop a new type of sole that would allow for both hiking and climbing, therefore not leaving gear behind to be buried by snow.

In collaboration with Leopoldo Pirelli, he studied a mix of cured rubber that revolutionised the market. The brand name was created as an amalgamation of Vi-tale Bram-ani. In 1937 Ettore Castiglioni and Bramani conquered for the first time the North West face of Pizzo Badile, experimenting with the Vibram soles. In 1954 the Italian expedition on the ascent of K2 was wearing Vibram soles.

So when you wear a pair of Vibram soles, you wearing a piece of Italian alpine history, often heroic, and in this case, just plain practical. By the way, you can send your boots off to be re-soled but I’ve got a feeling the leather uppers on my mine are going to go way before the soles ever will.

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