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It's the most beautiful machine in the world
Once, on a glorious summer’s morning, I saw the Humber Bridge rising out of some dawn mist and thought it might well be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. But then there’s the SR-71 spy plane and the Aston Martin DB7 and the Lamborghini Miura. The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao isn’t too shabby either.
However, after a long walk round the garden I’ve decided that the most jaw-dropping, eye-watering, hand-biting man-made spectacle of all time is the 1965 Riva Aquarama speedboat. There’s something about the angle of its prow and the positioning of that wraparound windscreen: it was actually based on the panoramic cinema screens that were popular at the time and this is why the boat was called the Aquarama.
Then you have the leatherwork in white and turquoise that seems to go so perfectly with the deeply polished mahogany hull, and the whole thing is finished off with a tail that tapers and flares just so.
That the most beautiful man-made creation should have come from Italy is no surprise. There’s a passion for aesthetics in Italy that you simply don’t find anywhere else. But what about the most beautifully made creation? Is it the 1995 Honda Civic or maybe the Great Wall of China? Perhaps it’s one of David Linley’s wardrobes or a Brunel steamship? We shouldn’t forget the Whitworth rifle either.
Well, I’ve just had another long walk round the garden and I’ve decided that the most perfectly crafted of all man’s achievements, with the greatest attention to detail and quality, is, in fact, the 1965 Riva Aquarama. Oh, and it’ll do 50mph. All things considered then, quite a boat.
Riva began to make boats on the spectacular shores of Lake Iseo in northern Italy way back at the beginning of the 19th century. To begin with the products were simple, robust ferries really, but pretty quickly, this being Italy, they turned their attention to the notion of going quickly.
By 1934 they were going very quickly indeed. So quickly, in fact, that one of their 1500cc racers actually set a world speed record on water.
After the war things changed. Old man Riva, the third generation of the family that started it all, was keen to carry on making bash’n’crash racers but his son, Carlo, had seen the new boats coming in from America and had other ideas. He wanted to make quality products for the leisure market.
There were furious rows over which direction the company should take. Some were so bad that Mrs Riva would have to step in and physically separate her brawling husband and son. And then one evening Carlo fell to his knees and said, “Father, you can take that bottle from the table and hit me over the head with it. You can kill me, but I have to make my boats.”
Dad relented and Carlo was in business. At first he didn’t appear to be very good at it. Fed up with the racing teams who argued that they must have a discount in exchange for all the publicity they brought, he doubled the price and scared them all away. Within weeks, he had no customers at all.
He also had no money, so he went to see the Beretta family, who had made a fortune from guns. They gave him enough to buy six engines and off to America he went. The first port of call was Detroit, where he had a meeting with the company that made the boats he so admired: Chris-Craft. They listened politely and said they’d be only too happy to supply him with engines providing he bought 50. That was 44 more than he could afford.
The next day he went back and with a lot of shrugging said he’d love to buy 50 but sadly the post-war Italian government would only allow him to import six at a time. Very sorry. Nothing he could do. The boys at Chris-Craft fell for the story hook, line and sinker and Carlo got his V8s.
Back at home he set about annoying as many customers as he could. Once, a German industrialist came to the factory and placed an order, then made the mistake of laughing when he was given the delivery date. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “There’s no way you Italians could manage that.” Carlo threw him out.
He was completely obsessive. He colour-coded the staff’s coats so the people in the woodyard wore red and the people in the engine bay wore yellow and so on. This way, if he looked out of his glass office and saw all the coats mingling, he’d know immediately that something was wrong.
Colleagues roll their eyes when they talk about the old days. “I remember once,” said one, “we spent all night going through pictures of our boats to see which was best for our publicity material. We didn’t get finished until dawn, and then Carlo messed them all up again to see if we’d pick our original choices a second time round.”
Putting that much care into the pictures shows just how much care he put into the boats. He used the latest varnishes and varnished them again and again. And then again for good measure. The Italian motor industry was using 1.5 microns of chrome on its cars. He was using 30 microns on his boats. He was so pathological about quality that it was taking an age to get anything out of the factory. He reckoned on spending 1,500 hours to make one boat — a ludicrous amount of time for what was only an open pleasure craft — but soon he was spending 3,000 hours on each one. Sometimes more.
Small wonder they became known as the Rolls-Royce of boats, the Stradivarius of watercraft. However, while his time and motion was a bit skew-whiff, his timing was impeccable because his crowning achievement, the Aquarama, came along in 1962. Which was pretty much the precise moment when the jet set really got into its stride.
In the olden days the idle rich played a bit of tennis and read a few books and that was about it. The only excitement came when someone decided to have a war. But then, towards the end of the Fifties, they found that thanks to the jet engine and the helicopter they could pretty well go where they wanted, when they wanted. St Tropez for breakfast. St Moritz for lunch. St Albans for dinner even.
The epicentre of all this, the maypole in the playground if you like, was the south of France. And that meant they needed a boat, and because they were very rich they needed the best, and that meant that they all ended up at Carlo Riva’s door.
Over the next few years the list of celebrity customers became a joke. He sold boats to Stewart Grainger, John Barry, Rex Harrison, Peter Sellers, Brigitte Bardot, Karl Heineken, Sophia Loren, Joan Collins, President Nasser, Victor Borge, King Hussein, Ferruccio Lamborghini, Prince Rainier, Roger Vadim and Richard Burton. The Aquarama became a mahogany passport to the high life.
Over in the States Chris-Craft were horrified and immediately stopped supplying engines, but this didn’t stop Carlo. By then he was on such a roll he simply made his own. Beautifully, of course.
Eventually the boat-building world turned to glass fibre, but Carlo refused to buckle. “Here in Italy,” he told me once, “we won’t take a shit unless the lavatory seat is made from wood.”
His staff were equally vehement. One day, at Portofino, a Riva salesman was to be found berating some poor chap who’d dared to park his plastic gin palace in the harbour. “Go away,” he shouted. “Portofino is a beautiful place full of cultural heritage and only beautiful things can come here.”
It was no good, though. The plastic boats started to take over and the Aquarama, at £250,000, started to look preposterously expensive. It soldiered on until 1996, by which time 3,760 had been made. But by then Carlo had sold the company to Vickers, who had introduced a glass-fibre cabin cruiser and were concentrating on restorations.
Horrified, he tried to buy the rights to his old boat back. But Vickers said no. Carlo told me it “hurt his heart”.
Today you can buy one of his reclaimed Aquaramas for £250,000 — exactly the same as the damn thing cost new. Whatever, you will have one of the best-handling sports boats ever made. There’s no power trim, no adjustable this and active that. You just get the wooden hull and two V8s, but that’s all you need.
Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, once asked to try one out. He was told that if he could turn it over, he could have it. And Gianni, being Gianni, tried. But couldn’t.
I tried too, one still morning on Lake Iseo. All I managed to do in one spectacular turn was hurl half a hundredweight of melted snow water into the cabin of the helicopter that was filming me. Quite what this tells us, I don’t know.
What I do know is that of all the machines I’ve ever driven, flown or ridden the Aquarama remains my favourite, the one I’d most like to own. Yes, an F-15 fighter jet would be a laugh but I couldn’t go anywhere in it, and yes, Leander, the superyacht, was spectacular but a bit of a bugger to run. Carlo’s wooden baby, on the other hand, has a real-world attraction.
It hits all the bases, too. It’s fun, it’s fast, it is exquisitely made and when you’ve finished looning around and you’re back on dry land you can look back and think to yourself: “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
I Know You Got Soul is published by Penguin at £7.99. Copies can be obtained for £7.59 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or www.booksfirst.co.uk