The Ancona yard that made the sub-500GT explorer yacht a category of its own
12 modelsCantiere delle Marche was founded in Ancona in 2010, in the teeth of the financial crisis, by a small group of shipbuilding veterans led by Ennio Cecchini and Vasco Buonpensiere. The Cecchini family brought decades of commercial shipbuilding experience, and the founding thesis was simple and unfashionable. The market was saturated with fast white flybridge boats, while owners who actually wanted to cruise long distances had almost nothing built for them at custom level.
The first yacht, the 26 metre Darwin 86 Vitadimare 3, was delivered in 2011. She was slow by Riviera standards, steel hulled, hugely tanked and utterly serious about crossing oceans. Orders followed at a pace nobody predicted for a new yard in a dead market, and within a decade the builder that bet on displacement had turned the explorer yacht from a niche eccentricity into one of the strongest segments in yachting.
CdM builds in the port of Ancona on Italy's Adriatic coast, across a 16,000 square metre facility with four construction sheds, the largest of them over 6,000 square metres, capable of holding up to ten yachts in build at once. A private four berth quay, opened in 2019, handles commissioning afloat for yachts up to 50 metres. Around 70 people are directly employed, with roughly 300 working on site each day once specialist contractors are counted.
Everything the yard builds is a displacement yacht in steel and aluminium, and everything sits below 500GT, the threshold above which regulation, manning and running costs step up sharply. Around 39 yachts have been delivered to date, with seven handed over in the last twelve months alone. That cadence, from a yard this size, is the quiet proof of a production system that has matured well beyond its boutique beginnings.
The Darwin Class, drawn with Sergio Cutolo's Hydro Tec, is the founding line, rugged, bulbous bowed and almost trawler-like. The Nauta Air series, developed with Nauta Design, softens the formula with lighter, airier styling, from the 2014 YOLO to the 33.5 metre Ammonite launched in July 2026. The Flexplorer line, introduced in 2020, added the signature disappearing A-frame crane and a working deck that converts from tender bay to beach terrace.
Deep Blue, debuted in 2022 with Horacio Bozzo, brings a flared, muscular look to the same long-range brief. The RJ Class puts Francesco Paszkowski's cleaner, more graphic architecture on explorer bones, and the Acciaio series hides expedition capability inside classic superyacht lines. RAW, unveiled at Cannes in 2024 with Giorgio M. Cassetta, distils the concept to its most functional form. One-off projects, like the 43 metre Babbo of 2024, round out the book.
The Global Order Book compiled by BOAT International has repeatedly confirmed CdM as the world's leading builder of explorer yachts, and the 2022 edition placed the yard twelfth among all superyacht builders worldwide, with fifteen projects totalling 578 metres in build. The trophy shelf backs the order book. The 43 metre Acala won her class at the 2023 World Superyacht Awards, and the RJ 155 took BOAT International Design and Innovation honours in 2026.
Ownership has evolved with the yard's scale. In a transition announced in late 2024 and completed in 2026, CLP2, an investment vehicle of Giovanni Cagnoli's Carisma together with the Loro Piana family, became majority shareholder. Ennio Cecchini remains chairman and Vasco Buonpensiere chief executive, both still shareholders, which matters to buyers. The people who invented this market are still the people signing the build contracts.
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