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In 1995, *Barche a Motore* interviewed Carlo Riva, owner of the famous Sanico shipyards, who recounted the birth and evolution of a true legend in the boating world, right up to the painful and difficult decision to sell everything during a delicate historical period marked by protests and labor disputes.
In the world of motorboats, the name Riva holds the same appeal and prestige as Ferrari does in the world of automobiles. As a statement, it was so obvious as to border on the trite, but it seemed like a catchy way to start the interview with Carlo Riva, so I blurted it out without giving it much thought. Engineer Riva, the world’s most famous designer and builder of recreational motorboats, looked at me puzzled and shook his head. False start. “I’d be careful,” he said gently but firmly, “about making those comparisons. If we really must compare a Riva motorboat to a car, the right name is Rolls-Royce. Ferrari brings to mind a very sporty, aggressive, race car. My motorboats, on the other hand, were characterized by solidity and durability rather than speed. They were boats with elegant lines and luxurious finishes, made for boaters of a certain social standing. Nothing to do with racing.”
Motorboats – And yet you were born into a racing family. Your father, Serafino, raced and built racing boats. How did this transformation come about?
Carlo Riva – I loved that world. I started drawing racing boats, down to the last detail, when I was 16. Our boats were winning races all over the place—with Alquati, the Romani brothers, and Count Casalini. The newspapers reported our victories; Riva boats were always in the headlines. But it was all glory and no substance. That was the problem. Dad struggled to make ends meet. Even though I wasn’t the one handling the books, I was fully aware that at the end of the year, we weren’t making any profit. I even had trouble buying myself a pair of shoes. That glory was all smoke and no fire.
B.M. — And didn’t his father realize that?
C.R. — My father was too in love with the world of racing to worry about the bottom line. Just think—some customers—fortunately only a few, not all of them—would demand steep discounts simply because they’d won a few races. At the end of the year, you made more money building a motorboat for Beretta (the owner of the famous arms manufacturer and of the island off Sarnico, ed.) or a few rowboats.
B.M. – Did you have any conflicts with your father?
C.R. – Unfortunately, yes. Even before the war, I was receiving magazines and catalogs from America; I was familiar with American manufacturing, and it fascinated me immensely. I wanted to introduce new technologies. “We need a drill, a lathe, a milling machine,” I’d say—and my father would shoot me down: “What do you think? We’re not Ansaldo, after all.” Yet I was convinced of my ideas, partly because I had the example and teachings of Cavalier Beretta fresh in my mind and heart. Giuseppe Beretta, whom my father knew because he was also a hunting enthusiast, had taken a liking to me and was generous with his advice: “Your craftsmanship is a wonderful thing,” he’d tell me, “but if one day you want to set up a production workshop that turns a profit, you have to learn to organize yourself, to estimate work times, and to understand costs and labor.” And he planted this seed in me, which I have always nurtured. His advice was gospel to me. I was beginning to think about striking out on my own, setting up a small workshop of my own, in Santa Margherita or elsewhere.
B.M. – Why didn’t he do it?
C.R. — Because I didn’t have the means. And because I always hoped my father would let me follow my own path, or at least let me give it a try.
B.M. — And did he let him do it?
C.R. – It so happened that one day my father fell ill and had to be hospitalized for two minor procedures. Nothing serious, but the hospital stay was expected to be a long one. Our family doctor spoke up for me and told him, “Give this kid six months; let him do things his own way, or he’ll end up leaving.” When my mother came to me and said, “Dad’s letting you give it a try,” I was overwhelmed with emotion. I remember it as the best day of my life. At the time, the construction site had twelve workers and nothing else. I started out practically with no resources, but with great enthusiasm. After giving me so much good advice, Cavalier Beretta also lent me the first three million.
B.M. — Aside from your desire to modernize the shipyard, did you already have plans to transform production and move away from building yachts for the elite?
C.R. — The most beautiful motorboats in the world were the American ones, and I told myself that I had to build them—if not better, then at least as good as those.
B.M. – Which boat did you draw inspiration from?
C.R. – The Chris Craft.
B.M. – What about our existing customers?
C.R. – They didn’t make life easy for me. They held my father in high regard as an excellent craftsman and, selfishly, feared losing a great raceboat builder. They would visit him in the hospital and say to him: “Don’t trust that kid too much—he has crazy ideas.” And so, even though I’d loved the world I’d grown up in, I decided to break with the past. “Starting tomorrow morning,” I told myself, “anyone who wants a racing boat will have to pay double.” It was 1951. They called me crazy. But I kept raising the prices because, in reality, I didn’t want anything more to do with racing boats. I kept only two or three clients—the most distinguished ones—who didn’t make a fuss about the price and who seemed to me like they’d be good future customers for the new line I had in mind. I had to get it into my head to organize mass production—which doesn’t mean making mass-produced boats at the expense of quality, but rather organizing production after adequate testing.
B.M. – Revolutionary ideas for the shipbuilding traditions of that era.
C.R. – When I completed the new shipyard in 1953, I called the senior workers in and lectured them: “From now on, you can throw away the measuring tape. The measuring tape is only used to make the prototype. Once that’s done, you use templates and jigs. Time is money”. They looked at me in disbelief. They were surely thinking, “What on earth has this guy gotten into his head?” I had Chris Craft on my mind—the most prestigious boat builder in the world—and in January 1952, I decided to go there to try to secure the exclusive rights to their marine engines in Italy. I wanted powerful yet durable engines for my motorboats—engines that were absolutely reliable. And in Italy, there were only BPM (Botta e Puricelli Motori, ed.), which weren’t comparable to today’s engines. They were handcrafted, and my friend and client Beretta—who was used to honing rifle barrels to a thousandth of a millimeter—would tell me, “Those engines have cylinders that aren’t round.” It’s true that Puricelli pointed out to me that Venetian taxi drivers used those engines summer and winter, but it’s also true that they treated their engines as the most precious thing they owned; they changed the oil often, took care not to rev them too high—all precautions that a recreational boater doesn’t take. And I didn’t want my customers to run into any problems.
So I was looking for engines that didn’t require a lot of maintenance. And so I set off for America. The Chris Craft factory was located 50 miles north of Detroit. It was winter, and it was terribly cold. The president welcomed me, and I told him that I had a boatbuilding shop and wanted to install their engines on my motorboats to give my products an international flair. I couldn’t have come up with a better excuse. The president set up a meeting for me with the sales director, and I’ll always remember that conversation in the restaurant of a wooden cabin on the riverbank. The current was carrying enormous blocks of ice that rushed swiftly past the windows. It was breathtaking—it seemed as if they were about to crash into us. I was afraid I’d hear the crash at any moment. At the time, my English was very poor, so I brought along an elderly interpreter provided by the Italian consulate. My counterpart kept talking about a minimum order of fifty engines in order to grant me exclusive rights for Italy. I barely had enough money to buy five. And the interpreter kept repeating to me that the deal couldn’t go through otherwise. I told her to be quiet. She was getting on my nerves. “I’ll do the talking,” I said. And I made do with my terrible English. The negotiations weren’t getting anywhere. We decided to meet again the next day—without an interpreter. The following morning, I was determined to play all my cards. I bluffed. I said I’d received a call from Italy warning me that restrictions had been placed on engine imports—no more than six at a time. So I signed the contract to purchase fifty engines, as the Americans wanted, but to be picked up and paid for six at a time, as I wanted—and, to tell the truth, could manage. And so, as I sold my motorboats, I sold the engines and was able to pick up more. And things were starting to go in the right direction. As for the engines, they certainly didn’t have brilliant performance, but they were solid and reliable, just as I wanted them to be. The Italian technicians said they were “junk engines,” meaning they weren’t sophisticated at all. In fact, they were simple: they had 4 or 6 in-line cylinders, low compression, and low RPM, but they lasted an eternity.
B.M. — Your boats have been hugely successful thanks to their elegant lines and refined materials. Did you expect them to be this durable? There are hundreds of “Riva” boats in perfect working order on lakes and in marinas—boats that are twenty or thirty years old.
C.R. – It’s true—I myself own a 1969 Aquarama that I take on vacation even to distant seas, such as Turkey. I have to admit that this longevity has surprised even me. I’ve always wanted to use only the very best of materials for my boats, paying attention to every tiny detail, even those that aren’t visible. Customers appreciated the beauty of the mahogany, the brilliance of the paint, and the shine of the chrome, but they didn’t know, for example, that the fuel tank was made of a special type of stainless steel, that the bronze of the bracket supporting the propeller shaft had been lab-tested, or that the onboard instrumentation was manufactured by the world’s leading manufacturer, the German company VDO. Incidentally, VDO’s director was a client of mine, and it was he who offered to be our supplier. Until then, VDO had manufactured control instruments for tanks, airplanes, and Mercedes, but had no experience in the nautical field. They wanted to give it a try, and being German, they succeeded.
The company, after all, was—as I said—the most reputable in the world. However, it took two years of experimentation and testing before we were able to build them properly and the way I—if I may say so—wanted them to be. The high quality of all the materials used is the secret to the longevity of my motorboats. Take the chrome trim, for example: the aluminum used is two or three times thicker than that on any other Italian boat. That’s why it’s still shiny today. I made many other small improvements based on my direct experience sailing at sea. That’s the real test. I remember the contempt with which Tillin, an old sailor from Portofino who managed a fleet of over a hundred motorboats moored in the harbor, would point at my boats: “Those are ‘laagu’ boats.” It made me so angry I could have run a fever. Especially because this Tillin was someone whose opinion on boats carried weight, and if a Mr. Lancia or a Pirelli listened to him, it would ruin my reputation. Tillin used to get under my skin, but I must admit that some of his criticisms were fair. He judged the boats by how much water had to be bailed out in the morning before departure, and the problem of water ingress had always plagued me—until one day I solved the problem by using pressurized plywood. I was the one who invented the interlaced layering technique, a solution that was later adopted by everyone.
B.M. – Now you should explain to our readers why, once you had achieved success and fame, you sold your shipyard—your brainchild. It was a sudden decision that took the entire boating world by surprise. Many people still wonder today why you did it.
C.R. – It was a very difficult decision. But the reason is simple: the whole world I had believed in suddenly came crashing down on me. I’m talking about the world of work, about my ideals regarding work. I was the kind of person who couldn’t spend a whole day with my family—and my wife always held that against me—not even at Christmas. I had to go to the shipyard, walk through the different departments, and breathe in the scent of mahogany. I devoted 99% of my time to work. So there was no financial motive behind this decision, as some have assumed. The factory was doing very well. My theories on work organization were being put into practice perfectly by my workers. Everything was running like clockwork. Then came 1968 and 1969, the height of the strike wave and union struggles. At that time, I was paying my workers, on average, 25% more than the national wage ceiling for the industry. Free trips to the beach and the mountains, white overalls, air conditioning. Tell me, where could you find a construction site with air conditioning back then? Everyone was treated very well; we were like a family: 280 people working with enthusiasm. So much so that when clients came to the construction site and saw the workers laboring with such passion—almost as if it were a pleasure—they’d ask, “What do you give them to make them work so hard?” In fact, looking at today’s construction timelines, I’m still surprised by how efficient we were back then. Today, it takes twice as long to perform the same tasks. There was a great deal of goodwill, as well as skill. Each production process was divided into various stages—to build an Aquarama, for example, there were nine production stages—and all proceeded according to schedule in terms of hours, not days, mind you. Work organization was my guiding principle. One day, representatives from the three labor unions arrived at the factory. They were asking for a 10% wage increase for the workers, just as had been decided at the national level for all shipyard workers. What a joke. But I was already paying them 25% more! “This is now an acquired right,” they had the nerve to tell me. And they insisted. And they kept coming back at me. I had no time to waste on this back-and-forth, and just to restore my peace of mind, I said I would grant my workers—not 10%, but 11%—as soon as the unions reached a national agreement with the employers’ association. But the union leaders weren’t satisfied.
They wanted to get company-level agreements signed so they could then use them as leverage at the bargaining table for the national contract. The union struggle was very intense in this area. Strikes, riots, even a fatality at Manifatture Sebino. It was no joke. And in the meantime, I was no longer master in my own home. I couldn’t move workers from one department to another; the trucks that were supposed to deliver the boats wouldn’t leave. Outside the shipyard gates, there were constant encampments of strikers. It was chaos. A world I no longer recognized. There was a last-ditch attempt to resolve the issues. We met in Bergamo with representatives of the workers and the unions. I remember that my emotions were choking me, preventing me from speaking. I had to take a sedative before giving my report. I presented the figures showing that my workers had little to complain about. They replied that if I had paid them more, it was because they had earned it. I exploded, “Camp out on the construction site, set the factory on fire. Do whatever you want!” They had to take me away. I felt terrible. As soon as I got home, I called Los Angeles. Whittaker had been courting me for a few years already. “Let’s get married; let’s join our names, American efficiency and Italian creativity, and so on.” Within fifteen days, we sealed the deal: I sold the shipyard.
B.M. — So, is it the workers’ fault?
C.R. — Without those events, I would never have sold. But it’s my fault, not the workers’. I should have sought advice from an expert in the field instead of making the decision on my own, driven by my emotions. But making sudden decisions has been a constant in my life.
B.M. — After selling the shipyard, did he devote himself to his family?
C.R. — Not much. I’ve never been able to sit around doing nothing. I had five steel Caravels built by the De Vries shipyard in the Netherlands. I sold them right away. They were yachts with many fine qualities: Dutch construction (De Vries), British engines (Rolls-Royce), and Italian design (Carlo Riva). The reputation of those names was my guarantee. After that, I oversaw the construction of another eight or nine steel yachts.
B.M. – And then you took on the Rapallo marina project. How did the idea come about?
C.R. – By 1969, I already had 14 service centers for my boats—we called them “Boats Service Riva”—in Saint-Tropez, Monte Carlo, Santa Margherita, Naples, Lecce, one in the Netherlands, one in Spain, pretty much everywhere, in short. But I was always in need of new berths for my clients. That’s how I met Monsieur Canto (Cantó, in the French style), from whom I purchased about forty of them. Canto had built France’s first marina in Cannes. In 1969, there were about ten of these private marinas in France, and I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t be built in Italy as well. I asked Canto to help me, as an expert, in building a marina in Rapallo, and I went through the paperwork to obtain authorization from the government. It took three years, and during that time I lost Monsieur Canto, who was worn down by the bureaucratic red tape and the difficulties that arose at every turn. Even the Rapallo City Council hadn’t fully grasped the importance of a French-style marina for tourism. And this, despite the fact that I had invited the entire City Council to Cannes—at my own expense, of course—to meet with Monsieur Canto to demonstrate the objectives and benefits, including the economic ones, of such a project. Everyone was enthusiastic. Two months later, it was obstacle after obstacle all over again. We just couldn’t move forward.
After three years of work—that is, in 1975—everything was ready, including the contracts with customers. Only one thing was missing: the occupancy permit. And the occupancy permit was missing because there was no lighthouse, no fire department, no water, no electricity, and no telephone service. All of these services I could obtain only through a concession. And the city wouldn’t sign the contract. Because it wanted a public port in exchange. It was an extremely costly commitment; it would have cost me three and a half billion. A huge sum back then. Attorney Acquarone, one of the leading experts in maritime law, told me: “Go ahead and sign the agreement. It’ll take so long to sort out the paperwork and secure the state concessions that the whole thing might end up being time-barred.” So I signed, and the city provided the services, and the government granted me the occupancy permit. The port was inaugurated and was already showing a profit of 60 million.
B.M. – How is that possible?
C.R. — Given that I had already sold (although that’s not strictly accurate, since it was government-owned property) many boat slips. We had a booth with scale models of the harbor at the Genoa Boat Show, and I’ve always enjoyed the trust of my clients… All things considered, as I was saying, I decided to sell. I never overthought the decisions I had to make. And since I didn’t receive any offers, I gave it away…
There’s no point in asking him why. It’s now more than obvious that Carlo Riva is just as good at business as he is at building boats. And then there was the unresolved issue of the public harbor, which must have weighed on his “sensibilities” like a boulder. Indeed. …I gave it to OTAM in Santa Margherita, which used to be one of my dealerships. For eight years, I didn’t set foot in Rapallo again. The guys at OTAM—good guys, skilled carpenters, painters, mechanics, good at everything—hired an administrator, a former Navy captain. It was a disaster: 3.9 billion in debt and the marina in bankruptcy. They started looking for me: “Come back—return to your brainchild.”
B.M. – What about the public port?
C.R. – There’s no sign of that.
B.M. — But who was supposed to build it?
C.R. – They. That is, the company that owns (or rather, operates as the contractor for) the private port. I had signed the agreement solely in my capacity as the legal representative of that company. The commitment had been transferred to them. In the meantime, I had traveled throughout France, where private marinas were continuing to spring up, and I had studied the full potential of these ports. And so nostalgia got the better of me, and I was tempted by OTAM’s invitations. Of course, there was a huge financial shortfall. The port was practically on its last legs. But rather than let it go bankrupt and end up in the hands of the municipality (which is what would have happened), I decided to step in and save it. I paid off all the debts—obviously, I couldn’t shirk the obligation to build the public port—and today I’m pleased to say that, after 12 years, I’ve fully recouped my investment. The port no longer has a single lira of debt and is turning a profit—perhaps not commensurate with the investment made, but a net and certain profit.
by Riccardo Magrini
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