Tortona is a city in the Alessandria region halfway between the plains and the Apennines with a basketball team that plays in the national A2. What about the boats? Tortona has no relevant bodies of water around or even a particular boating tradition, but as of this year its basketball team, Derthona Basket, has a sponsor that in the powerboat world means so much so much: we are talking about Bertram, the iconic fisherman’s boat that has had admirers and owners such as writer Ernest Hemingway, the Kennedy family, and even Fidel Castro who even had a wooden one. How did the American house arrive in the middle of the Piedmont countryside? It is all thanks to Beniamino Gavio, the president of the industrial group of the same name, one of the largest in Italy, which has its headquarters in Tortona. Gavio is an entrepreneur in the field of construction and highways, driven by a great passion for boating: in fact, he is also the owner of prestigious brands such as Baglietto, Cerri, and since 2015 also the American Bertram. The historic U.S. shipyard is relaunching with a new range that also includes the successful Bertram 35 (pictured above) unveiled in Fort Lauderdale in 2017 and proven to be a success. The Bertram 35 is just such a modernized version of the fisherman in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy, used to go fishing in the early 1960s, when he was president of the United States of America: a classic-looking 35-footer, but with state-of-the-art technology that launches it at over 40 knots
