2008. Saga Ceccarelli: we who made sailing history

Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.

Ceccarelli: We who made sailing history.

Taken from the 2008 Journal of Sailing, Year 34, No. 03, April, pp. 84-91.

No one in Italy has churned out 1,000 boats, many milestones of modern sailing. All of them have something new and unusual. A navigation through the Ceccarelli studio and its archives, from Epaminondas to John. To discover the evolution of design.

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Fifty-seven years ago, at age 26, Epaminonda Ceccarelli designed his first boat. His son Giovanni anticipates him and designs the minitonner Anita at just 21 years old. Together, in their Ravenna studio, they have churned out more than a thousand boats. Many are milestones in the history of modern sailing; all have represented, always, something new. Get ready for a journey through the archives of Italian sailing over the past 50 years.

1925- Epaminonda Ceccarelli was born in Ravenna, nickname Nanni. In 1952, after graduating with an engineering degree, he was awarded a scholarship to the School of Aeronautical Engineering. There he realized that the use of polyester resin would revolutionize boating.

1951- Malaguegna, the first boat. She is an 8-meter class C (RORC) built of planking wood. “Ugly because it had very short leaps,” Nanni recalls. It anticipates the current design trend by 50 years.

1952/60 – Construction innovation. Shaula (17 meters) Silvica (15 meters) Bella Ciao (third class RORC). The first are two wooden boats with classic lines that adopt, for the first time, bonding with aviation technology. The Bella Ciao is the first plywood sea-edge racing boat.

1961 – Giovanni Ceccarelli was born in Ravenna. While attending scientific high school he began working in his father’s firm. He graduates in engineering, in 1987, with the thesis “Multipurpose Floating Unit.”

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1966 – Classis 26, the first in fiberglass. A 7.30 m cruising and racing fiberglass. One of the first non-wood boats in Europe. In those years he designed numerous small boats built in hundreds.

1973 – EC 26, the French get pissed off. In the temple of sailing at the time, La Rochelle, Ceccarelli’s 7.80 m wins the long race in her class in real time. The French are stunned.

1974/77 – Sizes grow. Epaminonda also designs larger boats that are very successful, such as the EC 37 Albsail and the Seariff 55 (16.80 m).

1983/85 – The first boat is already a winner. John designs Anita, a minitonner, which wins the Italian championship and comes third in the world championship. In 1985 with Secondanita he wins the championship again with himself at the helm.

1991/95 – IOR world championships with quarter. John became the king of the Quarter Tonner class, winning three world championships in 1991 (Marfrio), 1995 and 1996 (Per Elisa).

1993 – Triumph on the Garda. Wins the Centomiglia del Garda, beating the boats of legend Bruce Farr, with the free class Dimore del Garda. He still holds the regatta record.

1995/2006 – 5 times Designer of the Year. Wins, unique in Italy, five times our newspaper’s Designer of the Year award.

1996/98 – Hat trick with ILC 30. His IMS-ILC 30s win world championships in 1996 (Kind of Blue), 1997 and 1998 (Ornella on the attack). His boats are super fast and unconventional.

2002/07 – Into the magical world of the Cup. Enters the world of the America’s Cup as Principal Designer. In 2002 edition he designs Mascalzone Latino, in 2007 +39.

Epaminonda Ceccarelli’s common thread.

He is the man who, in the 1960s, gave birth in Italy to modern sailing, that of mass-produced fiberglass boats. He is the first designer who, in 1973, went into the lair of the French masters, in la Rochelle, and beat them with his EC 26. He is the one who has never tired of repeating that we Italians are not inferior to anyone, least of all in the field of boating. And the facts proved him right. And even today, a young person who wants to try his hand at design is asked what ideas he has in his head before he knows if he can hack the computer well. In his long life, 83-year-old Epaminonda Ceccarelli had many ideas and always found someone who allowed him to put them into practice. Opening its archives is like swimming through the history of modern sailing. One is stunned by the amount of ideas with which he has inundated boating since the postwar period. Most successful, sometimes before others brought them to prominence, making them their own. His first work, the eight-meter Malaguegna of 1951, he calls it “ugly, with very short leaps.” Created for cruising in regattas it left behind big-name and much larger boats in the stern. If there is a secret to the speed of his boats, even the pure cruising ones, experts attribute it to his solid engineering training. As in: matching flair and creativity with solid technical foundations, in an era where the computer was unknown, calculations were done on a calculating machine at best, and drawings were born on the drafting machine. And it is Epaminonda himself who reveals what was in that period, where software was just the cogs in his brain, the extra gear in design, which allowed him to understand like few the principles of fluid dynamics and appendage design: “I have always been passionate about aeronautics and I even tried my hand at aeromodeling.” His degreein engineering, quite different from his degree in architecture, later allowed him to become the daddy of modern Italian boating. And his was the first mass-produced fiberglass boat, the Clasis 26. It was 1966, and until then l boats were made of wood, some in steel. Applying the concepts of industrial design, Epaminonda designed the prototype of today’s boat, where everything is studied first, both in terms of construction and layout. Since that 1966, his career has been one of continuous success, evidenced by hundreds of EC-branded boats coming out of yards all over Italy. But if you ask him what is the most pleasant memory of his long career, Epaminonda has no doubts: “In 1968, when the aristocrats from Trieste, who considered themselves the repositories of Italian sailing, got pissed off. We ‘poor’ people from Ravenna beat them with one of my boats, the C-class Maelstrom, winning the Triste-San Giovanni in Pelago-Trieste regatta.” Good Romagna blood doesn’t lie. Not even at 83 years old.

The extra gear of Giovanni Ceccarelli

No Italian designer has won as much as Giovanni, Epaminonda‘s son. Ten world championships in the offshore minitonner, IOR and IMS classes. And no one will ever be able to say that his boats blend in with those of his colleagues. Not even the ones he designed for the America’s Cup, Mascalzone Latino for the 2002 editionand +39 for the 2007 one. Ever since 1983 when, with the help of his father, he started the minitonner at only 22 years old Anita. “She was a rocket,” remembers a top sailor who raced against him. “She had something different than the other boats. Giovanni’s hulls have always had something special compared to others.” He himself confesses that in addition to his father’s designs, as a boy he was fascinated by unconventional boats that went outside the box, such as Police Car by Ed Dubois that at the 1979Admiral’s Cup amazed with its innovative shapes and performance. And he has always admired the designs of another Englishman, Rob Humphreys. John is also one of the few designers who has taken one of his boats to victory, Secondanita, helming it in an Italian championship. “I used to like to go on board my boats,” he recalls. “Then, in the 1990s, I could no longer follow all my clients. I had also started to deal with mass-built cruising boats.” And it is in the serial boat business that John has not, until now, reaped the successes he has had in the racing world. The Rimar 44.3 and 41.3 models from the Forlì shipyard are his. He does have one regret: “I had designed for the Cantiere del Pardo (that of Grand Soleil, ed.) a 40-footer that had well-exploited volumes and new ideas. Unfortunately, in the end nothing came of it.” Of all the boats you have designed in your twenty-five-year career that have won all over the world, there is one boat that you remember with particular fondness. È Dimore del Garda, the beautiful free class that tore through all the other “monsters” designed by the finest names in yachting, winning the 1993 Centomiglia del Garda. To this day he holds the record. “I think it was the most important moment, until now, of my design career,” Giovanni sentences. A magical atmosphere had been created around this boat and its crew, captained by the late Giorgio Zuccoli. And the America’s Cupexperience, where he the only Italian was “principal designer” for two editions, before Mascalzone Latino (2002) and then of +39 (2007). He does not speak of it with particular enthusiasm. But he is sure that if +39 would have had the necessary funding it would have made quite a different impression and could have demonstrated its full potential. Of one thing he is certain: the esperie ness gained in the Cup will greatly benefit the design. Provided that “computer technology always remains a valuable tool for verifying and optimizing man’s ideas.” And he reiterates, “Integral design with the help of 3D programs allows us to visualize forms in advance, to exploit internal volumes in the smallest details…these are useful tools, but at the base there must, in my opinion, always be the idea, the experience of man, the logical development that only the human mind of the designer can realize.” In this, John is merely reiterating what his father Epaminondaalways advocated, facilitated in part by having designed at a time when the pencil and the technigraph were the working tools of a nautical designer. The Ceccarelli saga continues.

by Luca Oriani

NDR – Epaminonda Ceccarelli passed away in Cesena on November 24, 2011, and was later buried in the Ravenna cemetery in a grave he designed.

In 2012 Giovanni Ceccarelli was involved as a designer and then as a management engineer in the project to salvage the Costa Concordia, which was shipwrecked in the waters off the island of Giglio. It was he who devised the methodology to be used for parbuckling, so as to put the Costa Concordia back in vertical trim before it was then refloated and transferred to Genoa for dismantling. In 2014 at the initiative of President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano he was awarded the honor of Knight Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

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