Cult America’s Cup: the Lawyer and his friend John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

In a few days, March 12, marks the birth of one of Italy’s most famous “Lawyers.” A cult figure, sometimes controversial, but it is to him that the domestic America’s Cup movement owes much. We are talking, of course, about the lawyer Gianni Agnelli, a winning and divisive figure who first, at a time when professional sailing in Italy did not exist, dreamed of chasing the America’s Cup.

The Lawyer after all has always been a great lover of the sea and a collector of boats, among his many passions. A sailor who is recounted as being extremely fickle, although there were very few fickles in his idea of chasing the America’s Cup, because first and foremost it was essential “not to look like a chocoholic.” Stories about Gianni Agnelli, and Azzurra is one of them, are shrouded almost in “legend,” so many are the nuances and anecdotes whispered around the virtues and vices of this character. One thing is certain, however, Agnelli paved the way, he was the first to see that Italy could participate in this game. Although the Cup today still remains a pipe dream.

“Don’t make me look like a chocolatier.”

“Don’t make me look like a chocolatier, Cino,” recounting this phrase was the legendary Cino Ricci, Azzurra’s future skipper, who reported how much the Lawyer underwent the allure of the America’s Cup without tergiversation, but at the same time had as his first concern to make a good impression.

The Advocate almost immediately welcomed Cino Ricci’s proposal because in reality the Cup was already on his mind well before the 1980s. Azzurra in fact is an idea that comes from afar, a vision Agnelli had 20 years earlier.

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Gianni Agnelli and friend JFK

During a guest stay with J.F. Kennedy on the occasion of the 1962 America’s Cup, in the presence also of designer Giulio Carcano, Agnelli was enraptured by the allure of the America’s Cup, which could be a perfect vehicle for the FIAT brand in the United States. However, the time was not yet ripe, and here indeed the phrase of the Lawyer’s “chocolatiers” addressed to Cino Ricci returns.

The Lawyer was, yes, a capricious dreamer, but he was a man accustomed to winning or at least excelling, in industry as in sports, and would be so throughout his life. Italian sailing and industry could not yet compare with the Anglo-Saxon world, even though the economy had shifted sharply in gear after the war, so much so that at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s we speak of an Italian economic miracle.

Agnelli enjoyed those days with his friend John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who a year later would tragically pass away in Dallas, and the atmosphere of those Cup races as seen from JFK’s boat left its mark.

Giani Agnelle and the birth of Azzurra

When he decided the time was ripe, in a few days, phone in hand, he put together a consortium of nearly 20 companies whose members included Iveco, Alitalia, Cinzano, Augusta, San Pellegrino, Pininfarina, among others. Finding a Yacht Club was simple, all it took was a phone call to Karīm al-Husaynī, the Aga Khan, imam of the Nizarite Ismailite Muslims, founder of the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda and Porto Cervo. The key men in the consortium from a managerial point of view were Gianfranco Alberini, Riccardo Bonadeo, and Luca Cordero di Montezemolo.

The designer chosen was Andrea Vallicelli, on the crest of the wave in those years, and the helmsman Mauro Pelaschier, with Tiziano Nava as tactician. The boat was built and launched in Pesaro, all made in Italy as the regulations required. Thus Azzurra was born, after the Lawyer had been hatching the idea of the America’s Cup in his head for 20 years.

He didn’t win it, but he certainly didn’t look like a chocoholic, in fact he paved a way: another Azzurra challenge would come in 1987, along with the Italia challenge, and in the late 1980s Raul Gardini would come on the scene, with the Moro di Venezia epic. Luna Rossa did not yet exist, but perhaps there was already an Arezzo patron who was beginning to dream something.

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Mauro Giuffrè