The Business District

For quite a few years, a large portion of Milan has been under construction and, only in the last few months, has this area become newly accessible and proven to be very skateable. The area, called “Porta Nuova”, extends for 1 square km made up mainly of new skyscrapers that have completely redesigned Milan’s skyline.

It is currently the biggest and most expensive construction site in Europe (costing over 2 billion Euros) and has brought new life to a whole section of the city. With all the ledges, pyramids, stairs, rails, popping up around the area, Gianluca Miotto had an idea of doing a short video project to introduce all these new spots to the skate community and pitched it to us.

"The Business District" showcases the architecture, the skating within this limited space and the difficulties that came with it. Being freshly open to the public and also full of offices, there is a lot of human traffic, security and businessmen that flood the area during the day so all the filming had to be done at night after office hours.

Also, for this project we gave ourselves a couple of rules: 10 nights to film using a maximum of only 10 miniDV tapes. Anyone who has ever filmed on mini DV knows that it's easy to quickly go through an hour of tape to sometimes only film one trick… This short video hopes to open a new chapter for Milanese street skateboarding and to push other Italian scenes to do similar projects in their own cites.