The low-slung, racing car-like Riva launches – known as “bank bonus boats” – stops people in their tracks as they dream of thundering across the Mediterranean at 50mph. Old salts pause to admire the contemporary but faithful versions of centuries-old Sorrentino fishing skiffs and classic American lobster boats so much liked by president Kennedy. The flybridge cruisers and offshore fishing boats appeal to sportsmen while deep-pocketed potential owners step aboard a version of the Ferretti group’s ocean-going steel yachts of 120-foot and longer.

Waterfront sages will always debate which boats have the loveliest lines, but there’s total unanimity in Italy that Norberto Ferretti’s designs boast the most varied ones. With nine major brands embraced by his launch-building empire, the 62 year-old former motor mechanic can reasonably claim to have boats for all seasons. Or at least, one for practically every kind of owner. There’s boats for racers (indeed Norberto has won two Class One world championships in his own boat) and dawdlers alike, for traditionalists, for sports-fishermen, for families and for long-distance sailors.

The Riva yard produce the thundering monsters, the 161 year-old Apreamare yard the Sorrentino fishing boats, Mochi the lobster boats, lone US brand Bertram the offshore fishing vessels while Ferretti, where it all started 40 busy years ago, sticks to its flybridge craft. It’s a veritable pleasure-boat armada.

But, as Norberto explains, the boats reveal common design characteristics to the true boat-lover’s eye. They are united by a somewhat understated design, even the menacing-looking Riva that has done service in a James Bond movie. “We work on innovation in terms of reliability, performance and comfort; we don’t like technological and aesthetic exaggeration,” he said in a recent magazine interview. “Our motto is: ‘There are two ways to make boats, to use and to show’. We make them to be used. Without quality you cannot get anywhere; it is not good enough to take refuge in Italian style.”

Boat-mad
It cannot be a complete coincidence either that Norberto is boat-mad, a genuine lover of the sea who aims to spend up to 100 days of each year afloat in one of his products, preferably his custom-built, 102 footer. In fact, he’s probably one of the biggest users.

Out of his love for casting off into the great blue yonder came something called ARG, the breakthrough anti-rolling device that was developed with Mitsubishi Heavy Engineering and first fitted on Feretti yachts in 2004. A boon for landlubbers prone to sea-sickness that reduces the boat’s movement at anchor, it’s the rough equivalent of the stabilisers that are standard on cruise ships.

Similarly, racing their own boats taught the firm a lot about how to make on-board systems bullet-proof.
It may be that Norberto developed his flair for beautiful curves from the automotive industry. His first job was as a teenage mechanic in his father’s car dealership in Bologna and, as we’ll see, he has a love affair with automobiles. But he jumped ship, so to speak, in 1968 when he persuaded his father to bankroll him into a boat-building business with his brother Alessandro. Their debut production, a motor-sailer, was unveiled at the Genoa Boat Show in 1971 to an under-whelmed public. Soon afterwards, they took friendly advice to switch to the production of luxury launches and thereafter the business grew steadily. Throughout its formative years, the brothers stuck to their motto that going afloat should be “an experience to be lived completely and not endured.”

And many did indeed learn that life aboard a Ferretti boat is not an endurance test. Among those who took to sea in one were Brigitte Bardot and Richard Burton, although separately.

Buying spree
It wasn’t until the late nineties, sadly after the death of Alessandro who had served as business manager, that Ferretti yachts really took off. With Italian private equity group Permira backing him, Norberto moved to rapidly acquire eight other yards and their brands. Soon the little boatyard established 30 years earlier had become the world’s biggest manufacturer of luxury yachts, adding massively to its portfolio of designs.

Next came a series of squalls. After the Ferretti Group was triumphantly listed on the Milan stock exchange in 2000, to the enormous profit of Permira which increased its original investment by some 54 times, it was hurriedly taken private again after the September 11 terrorist attacks that threatened the business’s future.

But by 2006 the group was once again doing so well, turning out yachts at an average price of €1.5m [$2.09m] but up to €40m [$55.8m] per superyacht in a growing market for luxury boats worth around $11bn worldwide, that it became a target for private equity. Norberto was clearly dazzled by the prospects as bidders came knocking on the door with offers that must have seemed fantastic to the former mechanic.

The winner was London-based Candover, which paid around €1.7bn for 60 percent of the group on the basis it would crank up production and pay off all that new debt. It was plain sailing for about 18 months. Then the crisis hit, orders collapsed and Ferretti ran into its own perfect storm of massive borrowings, fast-declining income and inevitable defaults.

Today Candover is no longer involved and although Norberto remains chairman and retains with the management team a 38 percent stake in the firm he founded, day-to-day affairs are in the hands of industrialist Salvatore Basile who prides himself, he told the Financial Times soon after his appointment in July last year, on not being “a financial guy”. With debt restructured, the group is back doing what it does best – building launches with lovely lines.

Post-Lehman world
But not as many launches as before. As the new chief executive pointed out: “We’re living in the post-Lehman world, and a lot of people in the pre-Lehman world won’t be coming back,” he said. One of the first brands to be hit, predictably, was Riva.

What hasn’t changed though is the group culture. Through September 11, listing and de-listings, the boom years and its near-collapse in the financial crisis,  the company has never lost its salty touch, the intellectual property that launched it and kept it afloat for all those years. It boasts a big team of designers and naval architects, some in-house and others contracted, who live for boats just as Norberto still does. The flair’s not been lost.

It was Norberto, after all, who so fell in love with the lobster boats that he bought the ailing Mochi yard and converted it to building them, Italian-style, for a global market. His rivals thought he was mad – an Italian lobster boat! – but today you can buy a 64-footer called the Dolphin. Before the slump the yard could not meet the demand.

The marriage of the traditional with the modern has also worked wonders for the Sorrentino fishing boat as well as for other designs which share technical breakthroughs developed by a dedicated section of the group. A double-ender famous for its stability in rough seas, the Apreamare yard’s designers kept the historic shape but matched it to a planing hull that flies on top of the water.

Heritage
Similarly, for designer Giovanni Zuccon, fidelity to the boat’s heritage was important in its latest iteration, the Maestro 65 with its open spaces. “I set out to create not a luxury apartment on the water but a boat for a sailor who likes the simple life. I want owners to be able to use this boat rather than maintain it as a showpiece,” Zucoon explains.

As the boss says, boats are for use not show. Zuccon is one of the group’s stars who was entrusted with the new Bertram and the Ferretti 630, sold into the US. For the former, he kept the classic deep-V hull that slices through rough seas while sprucing up the interior. For the 630, one of the jewels in the crown, Norberto would not let him change the overall hull shape but gave free reign to his creativity inside the boat. The result is 360-degree views of the sea, artfully curved windows that soften the interior, a more open saloon area where people can move about more freely, and a bigger lounging area beside the helm. In short, better to use.

Unlike many founders of world-leading businesses, Norberto prides himself on being able to let go. Indeed he laments that many such patriarchs harm their enterprise by refusing to entrust the daily management to others. So saying, at the age of 62, he indulges his long-running passion for vintage cars that has filled his garage with a such iconic vehicles as a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 500k roadster, an SL Gullwing and various Porsche, Maserati and Ferrari models of the sixties. Along the way, he picked up a canary-yellow Ferrari 250GT once owned by his late brother.

Classics they may be, but they’re not for show. Norberto regularly straps on a helmet, buckles himself in and races the cars in the Mille Miglia, the Gran Premio Nuvolari and other vintage rallies. He clearly enjoys driving these wonderful cars on terra firma but there’s no doubt he’s happiest on the Med.