The Rise and Fall of Riva: How Italy's Most Beautiful Boat Was Sold to a Bankrupt Empire

Описание: In September of nineteen sixty nine, in the lakeside town of Sarneeko, Italy, a forty seven year old boat builder named Carlo Reeva signs the papers that sell his family's shipyard to an American company called the Whittaker Corporation. Whittaker is based in Los Angeles. It owns nearly one hundred forty businesses. It manufactures helicopter blades, industrial chemicals, guidance instruments, and pleasure boats. Its stock price has collapsed from forty six dollars a share to a fraction of that in under three years. Within months of the signing, the company will be operating on three hundred thirty two million dollars of debt and facing impending bankruptcy. This is the company that now owns Italy's most beautiful boat.
What Carlo Reeva sells that afternoon is not a factory. It is a dynasty. Four generations of boat builders. Over four thousand mahogany boats launched from one town on Lake Iseo. A client list that includes Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Peter Sellers, and Prince Rainier of Monaco. And the Aquarahma, a twenty six foot mahogany runabout with a wraparound windshield and twin engines pushing it to nearly fifty knots, finished with sixteen coats of varnish applied by hand over two months. A boat so precisely built that its maker will not tolerate a plastic toilet seat aboard it. Carlo Reeva sells all of this to a conglomerate that cannot pay its own debts. But before we reach that afternoon, we must go back one hundred twenty seven years, to a storm on a lake in northern Italy and a twenty year old carpenter who walks into it.