Nauta was born from a passion for sailing and the sea. In the 70s a friend and I decided to produce, almost for fun, a project for a Mini Tonner called “Avventura 703” (L.O.A. 7.03 m) from the architect Andrea Vallicelli. It was surprisingly successful with 40 units built and sold and this helped me to decide to leave university and dedicate myself full time to my passion. I founded a company called Nauta Import which acted as the Italian representative and dealer for Oyster Marine, but after a few years the currency exchange rate made selling boats from England unfeasible. I decided to buy the “demo boat” and start doing charters in the Caribbean with a friend. After about a year spent living aboard, we had a serious leaking from the keel while sailing back to Europe and had to stop in Lisbon for repairs. The friends who helped me then are still some of the most important people of my life. One became my wife, while the others,

Massimo Gino and Enzo Moiso (who passed away in 2009), became my partners in Nauta. Although I had experience in sailing and selling boats, at that time I still didn’t know how they were designed and built. So, after I returned from the Caribbean I enrolled in a yacht design course in Milan, followed an internship in New York with Scott Kaufman, a designer at Sparkman & Stephens whose aesthetic sensitivity and style was a very important influence on me as a designer. Back in Milan, I convinced Massimo Gino and Enzo Moiso to join me in an even bigger project: we invested everything we had and founded a new Nauta to design and build the first Nauta 54 working as builders as well as designers. Nauta designed the layout of the deck and interiors, while Scott Kaufman designed the hull, appendages and sail plan.

The boat had its debut at the 1986 Genoa Boat Show and was a success. In the space of a few short years, we built a total of seven Nauta 54s, four Nauta 70s and four Nauta 65s. Then in the first half of the 90s, a turndown in the market crisis led us to leave the construction and concentrate on design and here we are today, after almost 40 years.

Is there a specific design that is particularly close to your heart? If so, why?

We would suggest two things:

First, cultivate your passion and spend the most time possible aboard sailing or motor yachts. Direct on-board experience is unparalleled in supplying a designer with the correct views and puts him/her in the condition to learn more about important details: functionality, ergonomics, interactions and constraints between different elements in the design, etc.

Second: put yourself in the owner’s shoes, try to understand their taste and feelings, try to imagine how they will use their yacht. Regardless of whether your design is a 14-metre sailing yacht or a 100+m gigayacht, your ultimate aim as a yacht designer is to deliver the maximum enjoyment of the seafaring experience to the owner and his guests.

A designer does not only work on the beauty of shapes: he or she works first on the quality of the experience of his clients, as design is the combination of form and function. But you’ll never have a balanced aesthetic sensitivity if you don’t work properly with functionality, especially on an object which will live on the sea, and deal with Nature and the elements.