Italian Yards

I'm over in Italy touring a bunch of yards, and have come across two that are particularly interesting to us Americans. One belongs to Sessa, a builder that's relatively new to the United States but that is getting ready to celebrate its 50th Anniversary building boats here in Italy. The company has a lot of models, from a line of small center consoles that it builds in a factory in southern Italy and which it will not export to the U.S., to a 42 that's built in the factory I visited. (It also has a new 53 on the way that will soon be coming to the States.) The factory is squeeky clean and extremely well organized—plus I discovered first-hand that it has a great cafeteria! It seemed that about half of the workforce is women, and I was impressed to see that everyone wears protective clothing (including respirators) and that there is virtually no Styrene odor thanks to a powerful air-handling system. And they must be selling boats because they work two shifts. Overall, pretty impressive.

I'll tell you about Azimut in my next post.