Where: Carta & Pelle, Via Nicolò Machiavelli 10, 09129 Cagliari
Phone: +39 070 204 8244
Online: atlaua.it and Amazon
A short heads-up, because this is not a restaurant or an archaeological site to review, but a product that many of you, given this blog’s diving leanings, might find useful. I came across them at Carta & Pelle, an artisan stationery shop in central Cagliari, which is not a mere reseller but the maker itself: the Atlaua notebooks are produced right there.
Atlaua is a Sardinian brand that makes waterproof notebooks, journals, and notepads. The name comes from the Aztec deity of water, which is a touch pretentious but forgivable. What is interesting is not the name but the substance: these are objects genuinely designed to be used in water, not shelf gadgets.
What they are made of
The product comes from the union of two materials. The pages are stone paper, a paper made roughly 80 percent of calcium carbonate recovered from quarry waste, with no cellulose and without felling any trees. It is waterproof, far more tear-resistant than ordinary paper, springs back into shape when folded, and does not cut at the edges. The cover is 2-millimetre neoprene, the same material as a wetsuit, which makes the notebook soft, rollable, and buoyant: according to the maker it floats for several hours, until the pages become fully saturated.
The crucial practical feature, for a diver, is that you can write on it with any pencil, both at the surface and underwater, on a dry or a wet page. A pen works on dry paper, but the maker does not guarantee the ink will hold once the pages get wet, so for underwater use a pencil is mandatory. Compared with the classic rigid slates many of us use underwater, the advantage is compactness and the fact that the notes stay, rather than being wiped at the first opportunity.
The models and the prices
The price list I saw in the shop was the following, and it matches what you find on the brand’s website. The basic notebook starts at 20 euros, with a choice of blank, lined, or squared pages. The version with a carabiner costs 22 euros, and the one with carabiner plus diving pencil 25 euros: for a diver this is the sensible combination, because the carabiner lets you clip the notebook directly to the wetsuit or the BCD without using up a pocket, and the pencil is already the right one. There is also a notebook dedicated to caving with sheets for surveys at 25 euros, a soft-cover journal at 25 euros, notepads with rigid or soft covers at 16 euros (including graph paper, handy for surveys), mini notebooks at 5 euros, and reams of 100 sheets of waterproof paper in A5, A4, and A3 formats, at 25, 30, and 35 euros respectively.
The prices seem reasonable for a niche, handmade product made in Sardinia. They are not as cheap as a plastic slate, but they do something the slate does not, namely keep the notes.
Who they are for
The natural target is divers, but the brand also addresses cavers, climbers, and hikers, that is, anyone who has to take notes where an ordinary notebook turns to pulp and a smartphone is useless or at risk. For divers the model with carabiner and pencil is the one designed for the purpose, and I imagine it is useful for jotting down computer data, making rough sketches of the seabed, or communicating with a buddy when hand signals are not enough.
There are endless reasons why you might want to write underwater: playing tic-tac-toe with your buddy, identifying 258 different species in a single dive, counting minutes and decompression times because you forgot to strap your computer to your wrist… who am I to judge?
A note on the ecological side, which on this blog I usually treat with suspicion when it becomes a marketing argument: here the case holds, because stone paper does have a low production impact, is photodegradable, and is coherent with the kind of product. The brand also declares a Treedom partnership for planting trees. Take it for what it is, but at least this is not greenwashing applied to an object that has nothing to do with the environment: it makes sense for a notebook meant for people who spend their time outdoors to be conceived this way.
They are available online at atlaua.it and on Amazon, but if you are in Cagliari it is worth going straight to Carta & Pelle, in the centre of town, where they are made by hand. Seeing and handling them in person is the best way to work out whether they suit you, and there is also the pleasure of buying an object directly from the person who makes it, in the workshop, rather than off an e-commerce shelf.
