Ancona is writing its name once again on the map of great Italian shipbuilding.
With Isa Yachts announcing the creation of a 100-metre masterpiece — the largest ever built in the city — the capital of the Marche rises, proud and restless, as one of the new hearts of Mediterranean yachting.
It’s more than a number.
It’s a statement of resilience, of craft, of hands that still know how to shape beauty from metal and salt.
But even success needs space to grow.
A city running out of sea
The fire at Tubimar left not only ashes but a wound — open, silent, waiting.
Years later, that absence still echoes across the docks.
Without new areas along the waterfront, hulls are forced to travel north, to Trieste or Marghera, taking with them jobs, knowledge, identity.
Vasco Buonpensiere of Cantiere delle Marche says it clearly: every hull that leaves Ancona is a piece of the city that drifts away.
And Giuseppe Palumbo of Isa Yachts repeats what everyone in the sector knows too well: “We need new areas by the sea, and we need them now.”
The Port Authority’s master plan speaks of a yachting district — a promise suspended in bureaucracy.
Time, however, does not wait. The global market sails fast.
Infrastructure: the invisible keel
Ships can be built in Ancona, yes.
But to attract owners, brokers, and crews from every latitude, the city must also build bridges — not of steel, but of connection.
As Alberto Galassi of Ferretti Group reminds us, the Marche capital still lacks what others take for granted: a high-speed rail line, an international airport, global links worthy of its ambitions.
Without them, even the finest hulls risk remaining anchored too close to shore.
The art of innovation
Still, the numbers speak a language of optimism.
The order books of Ancona’s shipyards are filled through 2030 — and beyond.
And in those workshops by the sea, a quiet revolution is taking shape:
engines that breathe cleaner air, hulls built from lighter, sustainable materials, systems that connect each yacht to the sky through domotics and satellites.
Here, tradition and technology share the same horizon.
A horizon to claim
Ancona has the talent, the heritage, the hands.
What it needs now are space, infrastructure, and speed — the essentials of a port that looks beyond its own waters.
If these pieces come together — shipyards, institutions, Port Authority — the city will not simply follow the tide.
It will set the course.
A true luxury yachting district in Ancona would not just enrich Italy’s maritime map.
It would anchor the country more firmly in the Mediterranean and give Europe a new capital for its blue economy —
a place where craft meets vision, and the sea becomes once again a promise.
Source: Corriere Adriatico (2025, September 29)
https://www.corriereadriatico.it/ancona/ancona_distretto_dorico_la_nautica_luxury_ma_dateci_piu_spazi_ultime_notizie_oggi-9095075.html