Codecasa

Two centuries under one family

Codecasa traces itself to 1825, when a 22 year old shipwright named Giovanni Battista Codecasa settled in Viareggio and began repairing and building boats. The business stayed inside the same family from there, generation to generation, through Antonio and then Antonio's son Giovan Battista, known as Tistino, who in 1902 formalised the operation as Antonio Codecasa e Figli in Viareggio's Darsena Lucca. Under Tistino the yard built around fifty sailing vessels and survived the shipping depression of the 1920s that closed many of its Viareggio neighbours, a period that shaped a cautious, craft-first culture the yard still credits today.

Tistino handed the business to his sons Ugo and Sandro in 1946. It was the next handover, to Fulvio Codecasa in 1973, that turned the yard toward the pleasure boats and then the megayachts it is known for now, as Italy's leisure boating market took off through the 1970s and 1980s. The family reached its 200th year in business in 2025, marked with an industry award from the Blue Design Summit and a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Viareggio yard attended by company and civic representatives, a rare milestone for any shipbuilder still owned by its founding family six generations on.

Three yards, one full-custom philosophy

The modern Codecasa is not one shed but three linked operating companies, Ugo Codecasa S.p.A., Codecasa Due S.p.A. and Codecasa Tre S.p.A., spread across Viareggio's Darsena Lucca, Darsena Toscana and Nuova Darsena basins, with a further production site added at Pisa's Darsena dei Navicelli in 2011. The yard describes itself simply as a builder of steel and light-alloy motor yachts from 30 to 70 metres, and it means full custom in the strict sense: no repeated hull moulds and no semi-custom platform sold off a brochure, each hull drawn from scratch around one owner's brief.

That approach leans on long-running outside partnerships rather than an in-house design department. Naval architecture on recent flagships has come from Pierluigi Ausonio's P.L.A.N.A. studio, whose very first yacht commission in 1992 was a Codecasa fast-displacement design, and exterior and interior work has repeatedly gone to Tommaso Spadolini's Design Studio Spadolini. The relationships are old enough that Codecasa's own output reads as a continuous conversation between the same few people rather than a rotating cast of contractors.

A working yard, not a museum piece

Two hundred years of history would mean little if the yard had stopped delivering, and Codecasa has not. Recent launches span its full range: the 43 metre Gioia and the fast 24 metre Vero both delivered in 2024, the 34 metre Pleiades opening a new Classic line in 2025, and the 57 metre Legacy 4, the flagship of a new Codecasa 57 series, delivered in early 2026. A smaller design, the Codecasa 55 Framura, has picked up industry design awards, evidence the yard's output still competes on more than nostalgia.

Set against series builders producing dozens of semi-custom hulls a year, Codecasa's output is modest, a handful of large yachts delivered across any given year rather than a production line. That is close to the point: buyers who commission a Codecasa are choosing a small family yard with two centuries of continuity over a bigger name's scale, and the yard's recent delivery record shows that trade is still being made in 2026, not just remembered from the 1970s.