“Progression” Mike Carroll once sagely noted “…goes in different directions.”

If there is one seemingly endless wellspring within skateboarding as an activity and culture, it is that- despite it being endlessly well explored- there are always those within each generation who have a different way of seeing and of being.

Ph: Kenji

And skateboarding’s lexicon of possibility is surely well explored at this point: for every skateboarder pushing the boundaries in terms of say speed or size, there are others poring over building blocks of the modern incarnation of freestyle known as flatland. In the interface between both those axes, given time and especially the internet, most grid positions get filled in.

And yet within that skateboarding world there are those who, as Danny Brady once observed about Kerry Getz, you could see in silhouette and still know who it was.

Giovanni Vianna is taking the boundary of possibility in skateboarding today and bending it in new and distinctive ways. 

Riding fakie, no matter what anybody tells you, is its own art form.

You might think that everything in life is reversible with enough practice- but ask yourself why you’ve never seen a Highest Fakie Ollie Contest.

Timing becomes everything when rolling fakie, and even if you strike clean contact on the ground with your tail, the board rises sluggishly, sloppy and sullen. 

Ph: Atiba

If you try to change direction from a fakie ollie, the board really does not want to know- making both Half-Cabs and fakie frontside ollies tricks of two parts- first to get it into the air, and then to guide it back down.

People who can wrap those two movements together seamlessly have a special gift.

People who can extend them beyond 180 degrees fakie-to-forward, are on a different playbook.

Ph: Atiba

And then there is Giovanni Vianna. 

His Caballerial Bennett grind during Best Trick at last June’s WST Rome Street jamboree brought scenes of bedlam to the stands as just about the most buck-wild thing witnessed on the World Skateboarding Tour to date. 

To even land in position of what is effectively a switch backside smithgrind, but slammed in sideways from a fakie backside 360 ollie (Caballerial, named after inventor Steve Caballero), is one thing which I would wager 90% of sponsored skateboarders couldn’t do. To transfer your weight distribution so fully that the board is effectively jammed squealing into reverse down the ledge- quite another. That’s the other 8% done.

To roll away with a thudding authority, why it’s near impossible, I tell you.

But in fact that’s only one part of Gio’s unique interpretation of skateboarding: Fakie Backside 5-0’s on handrails, travelling blind and just dinking the back truck off the rail like a nosebonk is a trick so sketchy that it must be impossible to practice without full intent every time. 

Ph: Kenji

Fakie frontside ollie to Smithgrind, Half Cab to Back Smith- take your pick. Tricks few others are even trying, and he is doing them like he means it. Put simply, Gio is taking skateboarding in a pioneering direction- and making it look good while doing so: that is how skateboarding evolves.

But how did he come to find a lane in skateboarding which he would come to dominate so much that it’s basically Giovanni Avenue, now? 

Well, why not let him tell us all about it in his own words? 

Gio Vianna talks New Forms with World Skate, above!