Zanotta × Ferrino

Announced September 24, 1969, at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the Bivacco was the only thing on the Zanotta stand that nobody was allowed to sit on. Aurelio Zanotta had asked De Pas, D'Urbino, Lomazzi and Scolari what else their welded tube could hold up, and they answered with a roof. Ferrino was brought in because nobody in Nova Milanese knew how to keep rain out of a seam, and nobody in Turin had ever been asked to.

The frame is three arches of clear PVC welded on the same high-frequency machines as the Blow chair, each with its own valve so that a puncture costs a third of the tent rather than all of it. Ferrino hung a single skin of proofed orange nylon beneath them on short webbing tabs and stitched it to the grey rubberised cotton groundsheet from its ridge tents. The round porthole and the rolled edge of the door, borrowed from Blow's arm, were the designers'. The six guy lines were Ferrino's, added after a test pitch on the Colle del Nivolet ended with the prototype rolling forty metres down the slope with nobody in it.

Domus photographed it on a Milanese rooftop. The climbing press was polite and unconvinced: the Rivista Mensile of the CAI confirmed it pitched in under four minutes, then asked about minus twenty. The answer came that winter on the Marmolada, where the arches stiffened and turned milky but none split. Testers also reported that the single nylon skin rained gently on its occupants at dawn, which Ferrino's leaflet described as normal.

The same leaflet, printed in Italian and German, advised letting a little air out of each arch at dusk and topping up after sunrise, as the tubes swelled by nearly two centimetres once the sun reached the tent. It also asked owners not to pitch on rooftops, which is where most of them were pitched.