Made In Italy

How an unassuming seaside town in Tuscany became the centre of the superyacht phenomenon.

- Mark Ellwood

“MAKE ME THE biggest yacht in the world – bigger than anyone has ever seen,” he commanded. It was a mold-breaking commission for the Benetti shipyard more than 40 years ago, from a client keen to tout his wealth. The Italian firm had already earned accolades for making fine yachts, but this was to be a new kind of vessel, a ‘superyacht’, if you will. Be netti’s designers embraced the brief with gusto and the resulting craft was the epitome of oceangoing glamour. At 86m, it had five decks equipped with 11 cabins, a cinema, and exhaust funnels sloped outward to allow helicopters to land on the helipad more easily. There was even a disco – it was 1979, after all.

The estimates for the cost went as high as US$100 million, a vast sum for the shipyard. More importantly, as the 1980s dawned, it launched a new category of aspirational goods. A simple yacht no longer sated the yen for cruising – only a superyacht would do. And the leading place to commission one was the home base of Benetti and its fellow generations-old Tuscan boatbuilders, a small seaside town called Viareggio.

In the decades since that ship’s momentous launch, Viareggio has become the world’s hub for building superyachts. There’s no formal standard for the class, but one rule of thumb defines it as any vessel larger than 30m. Of the 750 such ships built since 2016, 44 per cent were made in Italy, according to the trade publication