Custom and semi-custom Italian superyachts, built by the Palumbo group since 2008
1 modelsColumbus Yachts is not a standalone shipyard with its own century of history the way Feadship or Benetti can claim. It is a brand created in 2008 inside Palumbo Superyachts, the dedicated yacht-building arm of the Palumbo Group, an Italian company that began as a metalworking and ship-repair yard in Naples in 1967 under founder Giuseppe Palumbo. That lineage matters: Columbus was built from day one on top of an existing industrial base in commercial shipbuilding and repair, not started from a clean sheet the way most yacht-only brands are.
The first Columbus superyacht, a 54 metre christened Prima ('the First'), launched in 2011, three years after the brand was announced. Since then the yard has delivered a steady run of custom and semi-custom motor yachts from roughly 30 to 50 metres, built mainly in aluminium, out of Palumbo's Ancona facility on Italy's Adriatic coast, with a second yard in Savona on the Ligurian side. A newer Ortona facility is under development and due to come online in 2027, part of a wider expansion across the group. Columbus is, in short, a genuinely young brand riding a much older industrial parent - worth knowing before comparing it to a 75-year-old Dutch alliance.
Where Feadship or Royal Huisman will only build one-off full-custom yachts, Columbus works both ends of the spectrum. Its own site lists three current lines: Atlantique (long-range, higher-volume cruisers, now up to 47 to 48 metres), Crossover (explorer-styled yachts such as the 42 metre Big Naan) and Sport (faster, lower-profile yachts, the line that produced the 50 metre custom Anjelif). Within each line a hull can be built close to a standard platform or reworked substantially around one owner's brief, which is the semi-custom model most Italian yards of this size actually run on, whatever their marketing calls it.
Aluminium construction is the constant across the range, chosen for speed and weight savings over the steel hulls more common at the largest sizes. Columbus has also pushed hybrid diesel-electric propulsion into several recent deliveries, developed with outside partners such as Siemens, and the yard holds RINA's Green Star Plus Platinum notation, a real classification-society environmental rating rather than a marketing claim. That combination - aluminium, hybrid propulsion, a mid-market size range - puts Columbus closer to Sanlorenzo or Baglietto's custom lines than to the full-custom steel-and-aluminium giants at the very top of the market. The Sport 50M platform illustrates how the semi-custom model actually works in practice: the same 49.9m, 499 GT hull and engine room has now been delivered at least twice, as K2 in 2021 and as Anjelif in 2023-24, with near-identical naval architecture (Palumbo Superyachts and Hydro Tec on both) but completely different interior designers - Luca Dini Design & Architecture on K2, Marco Casali's Too Design on Anjelif - and different owners' briefs layered on top of the same underlying platform.
Palumbo Superyachts folded several yards and brands together over the 2010s: ISA Yachts (Ancona-based, acquired in 2016), Mondomarine and Extra Yachts sit alongside Columbus, plus Palumbo SY, the group's dedicated refit and repair arm - itself a reminder that Palumbo's core business has always included repairing other people's boats, not only building new ones. Giuseppe Palumbo remains sole director of the group. According to Boat International's 2026 coverage of the group's order book, Palumbo Superyachts had around EUR 1 billion in orders and 25 yachts under construction across a 20 to 100 metre range, with five deliveries scheduled for 2026 alone and Ortona opening as a third yard in 2027.
Palumbo himself described the expansion as the result of 'a long-term industrial vision,' framing Ortona as 'a key strategic investment for the future.' For a Columbus buyer this structure cuts both ways. It means real engineering depth and production capacity behind a brand that is still young, and it means Columbus shares resources, and possibly build slots, with three sister brands competing for the same skilled trades. It also means the brand's fortunes are tied to a much larger group whose core identity is still, at heart, an industrial shipbuilder and repairer rather than a yacht-only house.
That list matters because a number of newer yacht brands exist mostly as concept art and boat-show stands. Columbus does not: its own fleet page lists eleven named, delivered motor yachts from Armada (2011, 54m) through to Anjelif (2024, 50m), spanning the Atlantique, Crossover and Sport lines, independently tracked and photographed by Boat International, YachtBuyer, Yacht Harbour and superyacht brokers who have chartered or listed several of them. Anjelif is the newest and by far the most thoroughly documented: launched in July 2023 and delivered to her owner in 2024, she was covered in detail by Boat International twice, by Robb Report, Boote Magazin, YachtCharterFleet and Fraser Yachts, and was a finalist across multiple categories at Boat International's 2025 Design & Innovation Awards.
She is, in effect, the clearest available case study of what a Columbus custom commission actually delivers versus what the brand promises, which is why she is the model researched in full below. Earlier hulls like the 54m Prima and Armada, or K2 - the 2021-delivered sister hull to Anjelif, which SuperyachtNews covered at launch with real sea-trial numbers (21.5 knots top speed, 17-knot cruise, 70 litres an hour at 10 knots) - have far thinner independent coverage than Anjelif does. Recent Atlantique deliveries (Acqua Chiara, Frette, Night Fury II) and the Crossover 42 Big Naan are newer still and mostly covered only by launch-announcement press so far, not the sustained editorial and owner-interview coverage Anjelif has attracted across two full years on the water.
Columbus has been delivering superyachts for a little over a decade, against Feadship's 75-plus years, Benetti's 150, or Heesen's four decades. That is not automatically a defect - many respected Italian yards are younger than their German or Dutch counterparts - but it does mean far less independent long-run data on how Columbus yachts age, how the yard handles warranty and support issues once a boat is five or ten years old, and how they hold value at resale. No outlet consulted for this page, including brokers actively listing or chartering Columbus yachts, published a build price, a price list, or even a rough per-metre cost benchmark for any current model; every figure available is a charter rate, not a purchase price.
Naval architecture is also handled per-project rather than through one in-house design house with its own reputation, the way Feadship has De Voogt or Amels has Damen - Anjelif's naval architecture, for instance, came from the external firm Hydro Tec, credited alongside Palumbo's own engineering team, and K2 was engineered the same way. That can produce excellent, bespoke results, as Anjelif shows, but it means a buyer is not purchasing into a single consistent design pedigree across every hull the way they would with a yard that keeps naval architecture entirely in-house. Prospective owners should also weigh that Columbus, ISA Yachts, Extra Yachts and Mondomarine all draw on the same parent group's yards and trades, which is a real constraint on production capacity as the group's order book grows, and that a buyer researching Columbus independently will find far fewer forum threads, sea-trial write-ups and long-term owner interviews than they would for any of the brands with a longer, larger fleet.
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