The company was among the first to recognize the needs of northern Italy’s rapidly developing mountaineering and climbing culture, and to develop footwear with features dedicated to those pursuits. Those features, along with the brand’s legendary durability and fit, led to many of Italy’s early mountaineers using SCARPA shoes. In 1965, an Italian-American living in Boston began importing SCARPA footwear, making it the first manufacturer from the Asolo region to export to the U.S.

Scarpa Boots

SCARPA continued to innovate in the 1970s, developing the popular Rally boot for alpine skiing and pioneering an early high-altitude plastic boot for mountaineering, first called the Grinta and later the Inverno (as it’s known in North America, internationally referred to as the Vega.) That boot has been used by many top climbers and explorers throughout the Himalayas and Antarctic, and was also adopted by the Italian, U.S., French, Spanish and other militaries for use by troops in extreme conditions.