Italia sailboats: a Venetian racing pedigree built into a cruising range
Italia Yachts builds performance cruisers and cruiser-racers from Italy's Adriatic coast, and its story starts with a boat rather than a company: a 37-foot, 4,700-kilogram hull that founder Franco Corazza had designed for himself and his wife before any business existed around it. That sequence - product first, company second - still shapes a yard built and run by racing sailors rather than career executives, and it carries through a range that now runs from the 33-foot 9.98 to the 55-foot-plus 15.98 and 16.98, split across a race-oriented Fuoriserie line and a cruising-oriented Bellissima line.
Origins and ownership
The concept boat that became Italia's first model, the 10.98, debuted at the 2010 Genoa boat show, where the yard sold three units on paper before the company that would build them existed. Cossutti-Ganz Yacht Design drew that boat as a light hull with reduced wetted surface and a low, wide sail plan. Corazza incorporated the business the following year, founding Italia Yachts in Chioggia in February 2011 together with professional sailor Marco Schiavuta, amid a downturn across Italy's boatbuilding industry - a sequence Corazza has described as building the company backwards, arriving at the business plan only after the product and the company concept.
Both founders raced before they built boats. Corazza spent thirteen years working with the Danish builder X-Yachts and had won twelve Italian, two European, and one World sailing title before starting his own yard. Schiavuta competed in the 1992 America's Cup and won that year's Louis Vuitton Cup aboard Il Moro di Venezia. Corazza has credited early teamwork with Schiavuta, and with his wife Cristina, as central to the yard's success.
Recognition and growth followed quickly. Cossutti-Ganz's second project for the yard, the Italia 13.98, won the European Yacht of the Year award in 2013 - the first major international recognition for both Italia Yachts and its design studio. By January 2018 the yard, which had opened a second production site in San Giorgio di Nogaro, in Udine province, around 2016, had built roughly 100 boats across its racing and cruising lines. Ownership broadened around the same period: the Vitulano family of Bari acquired a 45 percent stake in February 2017, and the De Tullio family - who had first approached the yard as customers - became business partners. Daniele De Tullio, who had founded his own yacht-services company, Med Sailing, in 2010, joined to support the business technically and financially, and went on to serve as the company's Sales Manager. A five-year development program the yard ran from 2017 to 2020 coincided with that new backing, and by 2020 - nine years after its founding - Italia Yachts had sold more than 130 boats across seven models.
In 2022 the yard consolidated production at a new facility in Castelvecchio, in Pesaro-Urbino province, bringing every phase of construction under internal management; the company's registered headquarters remain in Molfetta.
The designers
Cossutti-Ganz Yacht Design has been with Italia Yachts since its inception, drawing the first model, the 10.98, in 2010, then winning European Yacht of the Year with its second project, the 13.98, three years later. Matteo Polli joined in 2011 after a design career that began at Starkel Design Studio and continued at 2emmemarine, where from 2005 he worked alongside Maurizio Cossutti on high-performance boats such as the M37 and gained his ORC and IRC racing-optimization experience. As Italia's chief designer and project manager from 2011, Polli signed the hull lines of the 15.98, 12.98, 11.98, and 9.98, before leaving in 2018 to launch his own independent design practice. Polli's racing résumé ran alongside his design work: since 2010 he has collaborated with the Low Noise team, whose modified M37 won the ORC World Championship three times, and whose Italia 9.98, Low Noise II, also reached the top of an ORC Worlds podium. Naval architect Tommaso Spadolini has also been credited alongside Cossutti and Polli across the seven-model range the yard had built up by 2020. Interior designer Mirko Arbore has separately lent his work to other luxury yachts, sailboats, and even a Boeing 787 Dreamliner cabin.
Construction through the eras
Across the models independent testers have examined - the 9.98, 11.98, 13.98, and 15.98 - Italia's hulls and decks have consistently been built as a sandwich of E-glass and vinylester resin over a PVC foam core, with carbon-fiber reinforcement added at high-load structural points. Early reviews of the 9.98, launched in 2014, described that lamination as done wet and by hand; by the time testers examined the 15.98, the yard was using vacuum infusion instead. The 13.98's construction added a system of carbon frames and stringers glued and laminated to the inside of the hull, with its deck laminated in one piece from stem to stern rather than simply bonded to the hull flange. The yard states that it invests in environmentally minded building technologies aimed at protecting oceans and marine ecosystems.
Lines and generations
Italia organizes its range into two lines: Fuoriserie, which the yard describes as a sport race cruiser line, and Bellissima, its luxury performance bluewater cruiser line. Fuoriserie owners can call on Squadra Corse, the yard's dedicated technical and managerial division for configuring and optimizing race boats. Both lines have carried real racing results: the Bellissima 11.98 earned a Boat of the Year award, and, separately, the Italia 11.98 Sugar 3 won the ORC World Championship in 2019 just weeks after leaving the factory. In 2023 Italia extended the range beyond sailboats for the first time with the IY 43 Veloce, a motor yacht the company describes as carrying "the soul of a sailing boat."
Who Italia is for
Italia suits sailors who want a boat built by people who race, not just people who build. Both founders raced at a serious level before starting the yard - Corazza with national and international titles, Schiavuta with an America's Cup campaign and a Louis Vuitton Cup win - and that pedigree carried into the design office and onto the results board, from the 13.98's European Yacht of the Year win to the Sugar 3's ORC Worlds title weeks off the production line. Buyers who want that racing-derived hull shape in a boat still built for cruising should look to Bellissima; buyers chasing competitive results and Squadra Corse's race-support program should look to Fuoriserie. Either way, the yard's small scale and design-driven history mean model choice matters as much as brand alone.
