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.