Nestled on the picturesque Northeast Italian coast lies Cantiere Rossini, a superyacht refit yard with a reputation that transcends its craftsmanship.
Amidst a steadily growing chorus of environmental concerns and a global push for more sustainable industries in general, Cantiere Rossini’s owner, Stewart Parvin, believes that the yachting industry can no longer go about business as usual.
Stewart is on a mission to ensure that Cantiere Rossini sets the bar for ESG (Environment, Sustainability, Governance) standards in the yachting industry. To accelerate this, Cantiere Rossini has partnered with specialist consultancy Blue ESG founded by Captain Nigel Marrison.
Together, they are ensuring that Cantiere Rossini leads the way, effectively writing the next chapter on ethical and environmentally responsible practices across the industry as a whole.
A shipyard with a history
Cantiere Rossini is a specialist superyacht refit yard, servicing motor yachts primarily in the 40m - 50m range. In addition to offering refits of various degrees, Cantiere Rossini offers warranty and servicing work for a number of major shipyards producing yachts in the 25m- 40m range. Later in the season, Cantiere Rossini also routinely services and repaints high- performance sailing rigs from top manufacturers.
Its facility is built on a site with a shipbuilding heritage that stretches back almost a century to the 1920s and 30s, having been owned by several shipbuilders over the decades. When the site’s most recent owners went bankrupt in the early 2000s, over 120 people lost their jobs and the location quickly fell into disrepair. “It was a sad place when we came in, in 2015,” recalls Stewart. “The vegetation was taking over; there was lots of pollution and a lot of outdated, obsolete machinery. It was quite a challenge fixing it up; it’s a real phoenix project!”
Getting the community on board
In the process of applying for the various permits required to develop the site, Stewart was unwittingly drawn into one part of the ESG world when he was required to engage with the local community, to explain his plans for the site and get their buy-in. “Without really knowing any formal way by which to do it, we reached out to the whole community, taking great care to explain what we were doing. We stressed that we’d be extremely clean and environmentally friendly; as sustainable as possible,” he explains.
These efforts with the community paid off, and the legal challenges that tend predictably and famously to beset similar developments in Italy, did not materialise. Within a short -for Italy - two years, Stewart had all the required permits in hand.