Riva

A shipyard older than modern Italy

Pietro Riva founded the yard in 1842 at Sarnico, a small town on the shore of Lake Iseo in northern Italy. The family started as boatbuilders serving the lake, repairing and building working craft across several generations. By the 1920s and 1930s Serafino Riva had turned the business toward powerboats and racing. The yard collected national and international competition wins that built its early reputation for speed. That racing pedigree still colours how Riva presents itself today.

Carlo Riva, born in 1922, carried the company to its peak in the decades after the Second World War. He brought industrial discipline to hand craftsmanship and made the marque a byword for elegant fast motorboats. Under his direction Riva runabouts became fixtures along the Riviera and objects of desire well beyond Italy. The name came to stand for a particular idea of Italian glamour on the water. Owners of the era included film stars and royalty, which fixed the boats in popular memory.

The Aquarama and the wooden age

Carlo Riva's work with the architect Giorgio Barilani, begun in 1956, led to the Aquarama, launched in November 1962. Twin engines gave the boat a top speed close to 40 knots. A mahogany hull, a wraparound windscreen and aquamarine upholstery gave it the look that named it. The press soon called it the Ferrari of the water. It remains the single boat most people picture when they hear the Riva name.

Riva kept building wooden runabouts long after fibreglass took over the wider market. The last wooden Aquarama Special, hull number 784, left Sarnico in 1996. That long commitment to hand-laid mahogany still shapes how the modern yard treats surface and finish. Wood remains a signature even on boats now moulded in composite. Restored Aquaramas still change hands for large sums, which keeps the legend commercially alive.

Ferretti ownership and the Micheli era

The Riva family sold the yard to the American company Whittaker in 1969, and it later passed to Britain's Vickers in 1989. Riva joined the Ferretti Group in 2000, which brought the capital and industrial base to move from lake runabouts toward ocean-going yachts. The historic Sarnico site still builds the smaller craft in the range. Larger yachts and superyachts come from the group's bigger facilities. That split lets Riva keep its wooden-boat heritage while scaling up to steel-era sizes.

Since 1994 every Riva has been drawn by Officina Italiana Design, the studio founded by Mauro Micheli and Sergio Beretta. Micheli first joined the yard after winning a Riva design competition in 1984. The exclusive partnership was renewed in 2024 to run through 2030. It covers both exterior lines and interiors across the whole range. That continuity of authorship is rare in an industry that often changes designers model by model.