Riva 1.6m Speedboat

The story begins in Laglio, a small northern Italian town on the banks of Lake Como, one day in the Spring of 1842, during the reign of Ferdinand I of Hapsberg, Emperor of Austria and Lombardy-Venetia. Men in Laglio had always been fishermen who also used to build boats. As such, they were capable of casting fishing-lines, threading nets and weaving fish-baskets with the same expertise with which they handled the construction of their boats.

Pietro Riva was a young man from this area. He was born on March 12, 1822 he worked from an early age alongside his father, a respected master-builder, who earned the sum of four Austrian liras a day. The master-builder was undecided about his son's future, for Pietro was too bright to spend his days as a mere builder.

However, it was not too long before fate intervened to decide his son's future.

A stranger from Sarnico...

That spring day in 1842, Pietro was repairing his boat, which was leaking because he had too often carelessly loaded it with bricks, when a stranger approached him. He was a fisherman from Sarnico, on Lake Iseo, and told of his two almost new boats which a storm wrenched from their moorings and thrown against the rocks. They had been pulled ashore and only a miracle had prevented them from being completely destroyed. No one in Sarnico was willing to try his hand at repairing them - why didn't he try?

The same evening, the stranger went to talk to the master-builder. How he managed to persuade the father to let him take the boy on, no one knows. He probably offered a good deal, more than the two Austrian liras the young builder was earning a day.

The journey begins...

So, in June 1842, Pietro went aboard the "Falco", a sturdy, engine-driven boat belonging to the "Società degli Imperiali Regi Piroscafi Privilegiati", with a third class ticket. From Como he went by coach to Monza, where he took the railway, then another coach - one of the "Impresa Generale Messaggerie" - took Pietro Riva on to Bergamo, where three times a week transit passengers had their connection for Sarnico. In all, he had spent two adventurous days covering seventy miles and nearly ten Austrian liras in travel expenses.

Once in Sarnico, Pietro Riva immediately set about his work in a wooden shed on the banks of the Oglio river. The villagers walked around the shed and stood watching him. Bringing him here had been a good idea.

Other fishermen soon booked in to have him do their repairs; and even before the two boats were finished, he was commissioned by a wealthy client to build "a fishing boat and passenger canoe, in the true style of Como".

The first new order...

This order was the first in the history of the Riva shipyards to be recorded. No more traces of Pietro Riva are to be found until June 1852, the Sunday when he gets married. By now, Pietro has four helpers working with him in his shed and he went on to buy a small house adjoining the shipyard. His move to Sarnico had therefore worked out and profits soon started coming in. Angelo, Pietro's first son, was born in 1853 and was followed by Francesco in 1855, Ernesto in 1856, Erminia in 1859 and Luigi in 1867.

Ernesto learns the secrets...

Out of this first Riva generation, Ernesto, in particular, was to have an impact on the shipyard. When he was still a child, he went back to Laglio to learn the secrets of the trade and remained there until he was 22, when he returned to Sarnico. His technical background was superior even to that of his father's and, more significantly, he thought ambitiously.

His dream of the future...

Despite the small size of Lake Iseo, Ernesto Riva had already realized that there would be very little future in sailing craft. In Como he had already fitted some cargo boats with piston-engines, and his dream was of using these to replace steam boilers, which although controversial and regarded with some scepticism, drove the wheels and propellers of the early puffing steamers.

There were many difficulties involved. His father's shipyard-cum-shed no longer sufficed, and a larger one was needed. It would have to be built on the other side of a bridge that, with its low and narrow arches, had until then restricted production to hulls small enough to pass beneath. Pietro gave in to his son's insistences and bought the land on which he built the new shipyard.

By now it was 1881. Ernesto Riva gets married and soon has six children: Francesco, Angelo, Serafino, Mauro, Anna and Pierina. In the shipyard, Pietro's four helpers had grown to ten in number. Business was booming. A ship-owner from Como placed an order for a boat to carry 25 passengers and cargo with a boiler-driven engine. This was so successful that Ernesto immediately built another, this time for himself - this was the "Sarnico", which took tourists sightseeing on Lake Iseo.

Fate intervenes...

A century ahead of their time, Ernesto Riva and his wife were already anticipating large scale planning. Who knows where this would have taken them, if the cruel intervention of fate hadn't brought all this to a sudden end. It was the 18 May 1907, when Ernesto Riva was overlooking the launching of a large boat. The wooden scaffolding suddenly gave way under the weight and the hull fell over on its side. Standing underneath had been this brave man. This misfortune could have marked the end of Riva once and for all. But, after a few days, work carried on, and this time it was the turn of Serafino, who like his father, had been the third-born. He, too, thought big, but not in terms of size, for the production of large boats was cut back. The relaunching of the shipyard was to rest entirely on engine propulsion, even though an engine specifically designed for a small hull did not exist. Experiments were taking place in America, Germany and Italy, and Serafino Riva made every effort to keep ahead of the times. On 1 May, 1912, he succeeded in going at over 24 kilometres per hour, in a racing boat driven by an outboard motor, demonstrating the innovation for which Riva was to become famous.

The Roaring Twenties...

The development of Riva shipyard in between the first and second world wars was marked by a series of successes in national and international motorboating competitions. Alongside racing, the production of pleasure boats was developed, which from the outset became immensely popular. Riva pleasure boats were to be found on the most exclusive moorings on the Cote d'Azur, whith Bugatti, Ispano-Suiza or Rolls-Royce cars parked alongside. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Serafino Riva could see little future for his shipyard. However, his son Carlo, 23 years old, viewed things differently. He wanted to expand, innovate, invent and risk, and did not have the family responsibilities which his father had to think of.

From father to son...

So, Serafino decided to pass the business on to his son provided he could find the money to pay him for the materials contained in the warehouse. The boy felt at a loss, with over two million liras to find for the materials alone, on top of which the same amount again was needed for investment and new models. Determined to succeed, he sought out the leading motorboatmen of the Roaring Twenties, and persuaded them to lend him the capital that banks had refused. Carlo Riva then embarked on a secret phase of development, designing and perfecting the range of wooden boats which were to become famous around the world for their quality, style and exclusivity. In 1951, he went to the United States, where he arranged for the importation of American engines for the first time, thus solving the most serious problem regarding his boats. From now on he had no serious rivals.

King and emperors, princes and sultans...

Riva Shipyards were now on the upward trend, triumphing at all the boat shows and on all the markets in the world. Kings and emperors, princes and sultans, actors, sportsmen and celebrities, and all the international jet-set that filled the pages of glossy-magazines, headed straight to Riva to choose their boats in the same way as they went to Rolls-Royce or Ferrari for their cars. During this period, Riva boats became a legend throughout the world, an object of desire and an expression of dreams. Nothing came near to matching the superb quality, style and prestige of the Riva, which was firmly established in a class of its own. However, more radical change was on the way, brought about by the dawning of the age of new material and technologies. Fibreglass, an easy-to-work, inert, compact and indestructible material, was cheaper than wood, easier to build and, once the boat was afloat, no longer involved any maintenance problems. Carlo Riva was well aware of this. To keep going, he had to start again from scratch. The new shipyards, that had been opened in 1954, had to be practically restructured to bring them in line with the new techniques, and a new generation of specialists had to be trained to work alongside the old pioneers.

New technologies...

In 1969, Carlo Riva sold his share in the yard to Whittaker, an American conglomerate based in Los Angeles, and controlling several shipyards in the United States. Even in italy, everybody was getting into the fibreglass boat building business, but none of them could boast the boat-building experience and tradition of Riva or the advanced fibreglass technology offered by Whittaker, Riva's American partner. The Sarnico shipyard was geared up to produce fiberglass hulls utilising the most up-to-date U.S. technology and equipment through Whittaker. Riva applied the same care and quest for excellence to these new boats and soon began to acquire the same world recognition as it had for its generations of wooden boats. Timeless masterpieces... Always innovating, always ahead of its time, and always exhibiting a style and quality beyond comparison, Riva produced in the seventies and eighties such timeless masterpieces as the "Superamerica" and the "Corsaro" which adorned the prestige moorings around the world. In the early nineties, Riva became part of the Vickers group, also owner of the Rolls-Royce motor cars company. A strange destiny had gathered the builders of the famous cars with the splendid boats already known as the "Rolls-Royce of the sea".