Zuanelli sailboats: a Lake Garda family yard now three generations deep
Cantiere Zuanelli describes itself as a family company that has operated since 1972, though its roots reach back further than that: founder Pietro Zuanelli, the son of Lake Garda fishermen, started the business by storing boats before it evolved toward maintenance, repairs, and interior fittings for other shipyards. That service groundwork carried the yard into a 1975 pivot toward its own fiberglass sailboat construction, and into a family structure that, in an interview with Giornale della Vela, Mario Zuanelli described as now three generations deep at the yard's home in Padenghe, on the Brescian shore of Lake Garda.
Origins and ownership
Pietro Zuanelli built the business around boat storage and grew it into repair work and interior fit-out for other yards before Cantiere Zuanelli produced anything under its own name. In 1986, Pietro handed leadership of the shipyard to his children, Mario and Francesca, though he remained present in a supporting role. A generation later, starting in 2010, Mario's own children — Andrea, Paolo, and Sara — began taking an increasingly active part in the company's day-to-day processes, extending family control to a third generation. The yard's plant today includes a 400-square-meter molding hall and a 1,200-square-meter fitting-out shed, alongside a storage yard for boats.
The designers
Zuanelli's first model under its own name, the Z40, was a 12-meter sloop designed by Sparkman & Stephens in the 1980s. A photograph from the 1990s shows Mario Zuanelli alongside Alain Gilbert of the S&S studio, suggesting the relationship continued past that original commission. Alain Jézéquel designed the FAX, and Roberto Starkel's Studio Starkel signed both the Z49 and the Z52DH as the shipyard grew through the 1990s and 2000s; per Giornale della Vela's archive on the Z49, launched in 1999, the model was an elegant, quality-built cruiser that nevertheless performed well under sail. Starkel was also credited on "Over," a one-off racing project that Zuanelli built and that achieved strong results in national competition, while architect Felci designed "Tè Salt," another Zuanelli-built racer campaigned in the Minitransat. Separately, Zuanelli handled interior fit-out, exterior finishing, and systems work on a boat designed by the Bologna Polytechnic that carried an experimental rig conceived by an Italian startup.
Construction through the eras
In 1975, Cantiere Zuanelli acquired construction know-how from Alpa of Offanengo, a neighboring yard that specialized in fiberglass sailboat building — the acquisition that, by the yard's own account, marked the start of its custom-build fiberglass strategy. That was a change from the yard's earlier work: a 1978 advertisement in the Journal of Sailing documents Pietro Zuanelli building the nine-meter Miller 31 before the Zuanelli-branded model line had emerged. By 1999, that line had grown to four models — the Z25, Z30, Z34, and Z40. Mario Zuanelli describes the yard's approach as autarkic, with 80 to 90 percent of each boat built in-house by Zuanelli's own workers, who handle everything from hull construction and launching to fitting the engine, mast, and keel bulb. The 2008-09 financial crisis pushed the yard to reinvent itself around refitting, building on consulting and refitting services it had already begun expanding from 2007; Mario Zuanelli has said the company visited other yards during that period to learn from what they did right and wrong. That refit work also changed what the yard builds with: classic deck teak gave way to laminates and eventually synthetic teak, and the yard has also worked with recyclable aluminum and an infusion molding process that sharply cuts atmospheric emissions compared with older fiberglass methods.
Lines and generations
Beyond its numbered Z-series sailboats, Zuanelli has built a run of one-off and cross-category projects: the racers "Over" and "Tè Salt," the aluminum yacht "Aluaka" — winner of the 2019 ARC+ — and "Trilogy," a 34-foot motorboat built for public service. Since 2024, the yard has also built the C32, a day-sailer designed and marketed by Comuzzi Yachts rather than by Zuanelli itself.
Who Zuanelli is for
Zuanelli suits a buyer more interested in a small, continuously family-run Italian yard than in production volume: three generations of one family, an in-house build philosophy that keeps 80 to 90 percent of the work under one roof, and a short list of named designers — Sparkman & Stephens, Alain Jézéquel, and Studio Starkel — each responsible for a specific model rather than a house style. It's also a yard whose story didn't end with its core sailboat line: the same shop that built the Z40 and the Z49 later reinvented itself around refitting after the 2008-09 crisis and took on one-off racers, an aluminum ARC+ winner, and a third-party day-sailer.
