Rolls-Royce of the seas
Lake Como rests mysteriously on this early August morning. Dark blue and smooth like polished wood. When Erio Matteri brakes this early-morning silence with the engine of his Riva Tritone, he’s happy as Larry. “This is music!” he shouts when the inboard motor roars powerfully while accelerating.
65-year-old Erio Matteri, weather-beaten skin and muscular, is a boatbuilder – and, above all, a boat restorer. He’s the owner of Cantiere Nautico Matteri in Lezzeno, a municipality with a population of 2,000, situated at the southern tip of Lake Como. The company is a 150-year-old family business with four generations of wood- and boatbuilding-expertise. The lakefront shipyard is crammed with spare parts, motors, the best mahogany boards and, of course, lots of boats. Erio has specialised in restoring wooden Riva boats from the 1950s and 1960s. They were designed by Carlo Riva only one lake to the east, at nearby Lago d’Iseo. They’re real gems, genuine Italian craftsmanship.
A Riva was the means of transport that the jet set liked to show up in during the summer season. Sophia Loren glided over the waves in this chrome-plated boat with its slim stern just like Sean Connery and Gunther Sachs. It’s not too hard to imagine Sachs’s girlfriend Brigitte Bardot lounging on the deep-red mahogany planks.
About 4,000 of the classy boats were built before Carlo Riva sold his company in 1969. Today’s Riva models are produced by the Ferretti group and are mainly made of synthetic materials and fibreglass. That makes the old ones – there are still about 2,000 of them – all the more sought-after. You have to pay up to 600,000 euros for one of these design classics.
The original Rivas are works of art for Erio Matteri. He took pity on them when more and more of the boats started to fall into disrepair after the triumphant introduction of synthetic materials to the world of design in the 1970s. Some owners even sank their boats or turned them into firewood because it was impossible to find any spare parts. Matteri purchased 40 Rivas at incredibly low prices. He really didn’t expect the boats to become so highly appreciated again. He simply loves them.
“They’re my everyday routine! My income! My life!” Matteri disassembles them board by board, tending to each and every square centimetre before reassembling them afterwards. At the moment, there are 15 Rivas in his shipyard. Customers ship them by freighter or railway from New Zealand and Canada.
About 40 other classics are stored in his adjoining yacht club. The owners entrust their gems to him when they’re not using them because they want to be absolutely sure they’re in the best hands.
Matteri himself owns six Rivas, which he rents out for 3,500 euros a day, including a skipper. It’s hard to believe how many high-value objects are lying about here as if they were ordinary boats. Also the old photographs, which decorate the wall of the workshop and show Matteri with illustrious customers like Bill Gates, Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas, seem to belong to another world. The business is as unassuming as the signboard hidden between shrubs up the road.
Matteri’s day begins at seven o’clock in the morning and it ends late in the evening. He works seven days a week. “My mum says if she was a boat, she would have seen more of her husband in her life”, recounts daughter Francesca, who is responsible for the finances of the Matteri business. Meanwhile, mother Paola plays with her granddaughters – and she dreams of a life in Australia. “L’Australia è bella!”, she says. She’s covered the magnificent view from her living room of Lake Como with dark curtains. “Italy? Oh well… Australia! That’d be it!” And after that, she has to smile a little bit.
That early, no one else is around. Only the squealing of the gulls blends into the sound of the engine. A Riva’s maximum speed is up to 90 kilometres per hour and Matteri loves to accelerate. That’s George Clooney’s estate, he explains, adding “he left four days ago”. Then Matteri points out Angela Missoni’s property. “A good friend of ours”, he says, and the one belonging to Richard Branson over there, which basically “anyone can rent – for 125,000 euros a week”. As soon as Matteri spots a boat, he grabs his binoculars. After all, he has to know what’s happening on his lake. “The Rivas are perfect just as they are,” he says. So he changes absolutely nothing when restoring them, not even the smallest detail. Even when one of his celebrity neighbours asks him to, he makes “no exceptions!”
His mobile rings. If someone has a problem with his boat, he calls Erio. If someone is looking for a private Riva, he calls Erio. And if someone wants an assessment whether a Riva is worth the price that the seller is asking for, he naturally also calls Erio. “Boats always cause problems!” he says. And what’s his biggest problem? “That I can’t say no!” He’s often called because of his unique skill: he only has to tap the wood to know if it’s rotten from the inside and to know how much time it will take to restore it. Sometimes he calculates 500 person-hours, sometimes 3,000. “Only someone who is an excellent boatbuilder can also restore excellently,” he says, without sounding arrogant.
Indeed, he seldom gets down to boatbuilding; the Rivas keep him busy. Daughter Francesca isn’t sad about this. She says her father needs this from time to time. That’s when he builds sports boats like his Electro Zero Emission Boats or a reinterpretation of the “Lucia” – a kind of Venetian gondola with special roofing. Once upon a time, Gianni Versace fell in love with the “Lucia”, which was the trademark of the Matteri family when the business was still run by Erio’s father. “All those ideas he has! His perfectionism! That’s not profitable!” she exclaims, adding that it’s a good thing that he has to stick to the original guidelines when it comes to the Rivas.
There’s an old saying: anyone who was born with their feet on the lake can’t leave. Moving has always been out of the question for Erio Matteri. Even when he was a little boy, he used to head straight for the shipyard after school. Who will take over the business one day? Father and daughter look at each other. “We don’t think about tomorrow; we live for the moment,” says Francesca. Of course they could do more. They could build more boats, restore more, they could expand. But then they’d have to reposition the company, hire more employees. They’re a team of six at present. This means that they can meet at the yacht club and chat a little, about tourism, the region, Italy, the world – and about the boats. “Everything is going really well at the moment,” says Erio. “È fantastico!”
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This article was first published in the autumn 2016 print edition of 30 Grad.