Legacy, at its heart, is about a bequest. It’s the act of leaving something from the past that might affect the future. Legacy can be small or large, fleeting or long-lasting, woefully insignificant or deeply meaningful. The individuals whose legacies live on the longest tend to be remembered as visionaries, with deaths that mark a before-and-after line in all of our lives.
For people all around the world who love to enjoy the water aboard yachts, Paolo Vitelli’s death in December left that type of mark. The founder of Azimut Yachts who went on to build the globally dominant Azimut Benetti Group died following an accident at home in Italy. He was 77.
“He had an overabundance of excitement about creating boats and coming up with ideas about boats,” says Yachting Editor-in-Chief Patrick Sciacca. “There are people who have jobs, and there are people who have purpose. He had an energy that flowed off of him. He loved what he did. You could feel it.”
Vitelli was born in Turin, Italy, in 1947. At first, he attempted the nightclub business, but then used his earnings to rent a boat and explore the coast—an experience he loved so much, and repeated so often, that people started asking him how they could do it too. At age 21, Vitelli founded Azimut Srl as a charter business before he had graduated from college.
Soon, Azimut was a brokerage and then an importer of boats from Northern Europe and England. The business then evolved into construction with Italian style. Vitelli launched a series of Azimut builds in the mid-1970s, including his first model, the fiberglass AZ 43 Bali. In 1977, he premiered the AZ 32 with features that many people take for granted today, such as a raised wheelhouse and an opening sunroof. He didn’t think of these early boats as luxurious, but instead as ways to help people get on the water.
Vitelli next expanded the Azimut range up to the Failaka 105—at the time, the largest fiberglass boat ever built, ushering in an era of mass production for larger fiberglass yachts. Various hulls of the Failaka 105 were sold to prominent people worldwide, including a Middle Eastern prince and the Onassis family, putting Vitelli in a position to expand further.
In 1985, he acquired another Italian brand: Benetti. That shipyard had been turning out everything from commercial vessels to private yachts for more than a century, and had gained international fame with the 282-foot Nabila—at the time, the largest private yacht in the world. It had a futuristic silver hull that turned heads in every harbor and had been shown in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again, but it also represented a financial loss for Benetti, which ended up filing for bankruptcy after the delivery. Vitelli purchased what was left of Benetti, scooped up the yard’s reputation for innovation, and merged the businesses into Azimut Benetti Group.
That move laid the groundwork for the company that today reports revenues of about $1.3 billion and 20 percent share in the global mega-yacht market. Vitelli achieved that success by focusing on innovations, expansions and promotions throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. He embraced competition at a time when all kinds of advancements were being made in powerboat design and systems creation, from transatlantic racing to sustainability.
In recent years, Vitelli was a vocal champion of eco-friendly powerboating. He talked frequently about how he cruised in the Mediterranean each summer and thought the entire coastline could be better protected for future generations to enjoy.
Vitelli thought about legacy in other ways too. In 2023, his daughter, Giovanna Vitelli, succeeded her father and became chairwoman of Azimut Benetti Group—a fact that Paolo Vitelli said made him immensely proud, as he was able to hand over the family-run company with no major drama, no significant restructuring and no intervention from banks. His vision of eco-friendly cruising remains core to the group’s plans, with work on HVO biofuel and hybrid technologies. Half of Azimut’s fleet includes low-emission yachts with four levels of electrification, such as full hybrid. Benetti offers hybrid versions of almost its entire range, and the B.Yond line achieves significant carbon-dioxide reductions compared to conventional yachts, as does the Azimut Seadeck series.
Giovanna Vitelli recently marked the quarter-century history of the group her father created by saying: “Twenty-five years at the top of the sector represent a true record within a record, a testament to our unwavering entrepreneurial vision, which is based on an organic, resilient and sustainable growth strategy aimed at creating durable value that lasts over time.”
She will now carry on her father’s legacy. Hopefully, for many more years to come.
