Osteria Luna Park ai Pioppi
A playground that is not a playground. A country restaurant that is not a country restaurant.
by nina zerby
Much has been said and written about Luna Park at the Osteria ai Pioppi in Nervesa della Battaglia. It will be due to the aura of magic emanated by Bruno Ferrin, the visionary inventor who dedicated his life to the manual construction of mechanical games in the park of his restaurant. Year after year and dizzy dizziness, this dreamer has created a place out of time, a playground that is not a playground, a Luna Park that is not a Luna Park, a rural inn that is not a Country Tavern.
It was 1969 when Bruno and his wife Marisa started building some games in the woods surrounding their tavern. And he liked it so much that they came to build more than forty.
Between beech and chestnut trees, you will find a playground built with recycled material, with complex mechanisms, a playground that works with the only energy of those who climb it or with the slope of the track on which they are positioned.
The steeper routes, those that are similar to a roller coaster to be clear, work with a minimum of electricity needed to start them, but all the others run with kinetic energy. From a simple swing here is a slide of 3 meters, then a slide of 30 meters, and in 40 years, here is a real free and non-electric playground with attractions such as the trampoline, the cage, the bob, crossing death pedals and many others , all handmade.
The park was built with the collaboration of technical figures such as the designer Paolo Schiavetto and the engineer Roberto Scandiuzzi, who verified both the feasibility and the safety guaranteed by the continuous maintenance of the Pioppi staff to avoid unpleasant accidents.
If you think you can come here and find the classic amusement park with hyper-technological games, polished for a party, full of colored lights and deafening music, I strongly advise you not to even go out. Here we only accept dreamers ready to jump back in time, ready to catapult themselves to a place where everyone can be children again.
Remember that it is also a place where you get dirty, where leaves and dust stick to your skin and clothes, exactly as it happened when we came home with black legs and wild smell.
The tavern cuisine is simple and genuine with very popular prices. In addition to the stuffed sandwiches on site, there is grilled meat, cooked cheese, polenta and cod.
Visited by chance by the Brazilian director Luiz Romero, what was just a trip with friends led him to make a short film whose transmission had a great international impact: everyone talks about it, everyone wants to see that it is a reality that now has fans all over the world, to the point that the British newspaper The Guardian has included the Osteria ai Pioppi among the ten attractions made by himself.
Due to the current health emergency, the park is temporarily closed, but we all hope that they can reopen as soon as possible.
aipioppi.com
photo courtesy osteria luna park ai pioppi