Ferretti sailboats: a decade-long chapter before the motor-yacht era
Before it became known for motor yachts, Ferretti built sailboats for a little over a decade. The founding and earliest boats trace back to a Bologna dealership, and the sailing chapter closed almost as quickly as it opened.
Origins and ownership
Ferretti's own company history credits "the Ferretti brothers" with taking on the dealership for the American motorboat maker Chris-Craft in 1968, an arrangement that gave rise to Ferretti Nautica. Norberto Ferretti, in his own account, tells it differently: the Bologna Chris-Craft franchise for Emilia Romagna belonged to their father, Otello, and Norberto himself started out building sailboats. The yard's first boat, launched in 1971, was a 10-meter wooden motorsailer named Khamsin, built on a fishing-boat hull. Decades later, control of the company changed hands: Ferretti's own history puts a 75-percent stake going to China's Weichai Group in 2012, while Norberto Ferretti's own account instead describes ceding control to Weichai in 2013.
Construction through the eras
Higher-performing sailboats followed Khamsin through the 1970s — the Altura 33 and, especially, the Altura 42, which Norberto Ferretti has called one of the milestones of his career. The line's best-documented boat is the Altura 41, which debuted at the 1983 Genoa Boat Show under the signature of American naval architect Dick Carter. Giornale della Vela wrote that the boat fit the Ferretti tradition of comfortable construction with close attention to detail; its hull was hand-laid from polyester resin and fiberglass to RINa and Lloyd's standards, and its ballast bulb — offered fixed or fully retractable — was cast iron treated with the Veneziani paint cycle. The pivot away from sail came soon after: Ferretti's own history dates its first motor-only boat, and the start of its sport-fisherman, open, and flybridge production, to 1982; Norberto Ferretti's own retelling instead places the turning point at the Altura 38.
Who Ferretti is for
A used Ferretti sailboat is a snapshot of that narrow window — a yard that built wooden motorsailers, then a small run of Altura sailboats, before turning fully to power by the early 1980s. In his own retelling, Norberto Ferretti recounted refusing to sell one of those early boats to Prince Rainier III of Monaco, a detail from a chapter the company's own history has since folded into a single paragraph. Buyers drawn to that chapter are looking for a rare, historically specific boat rather than a brand still building to its original identity.