Across the generations: sailors reading the wind

Giovanni Soldini, 57 years old, is the only Italian to have won a solo round-the-world race – scooping the Around Alone title in 1999.Four years earlier he completed his first solo circumnavigation of the globe, coming second in the smallest class of boat in the race, which was then called the BOC Challenge. Today he sails in a team on the flying trimaran Maserati Multi 70 and has set multiple records.

I was 15 or 16 years old and lucky enough to meet [Italian sailing legend] Franco Malingri. He would take his family and friends out sailing, he had even done the Whitbread, the name by which the round-the-world race was known then. The first thing I did though was to build a boat: it was called Moana 38. From there I started sailing and being a sailor.

When I first sailed around the world there was no GPS. The Only way to communicate was by radio. On my first trips with Moana 38, I used to assess the situation with a sextant and a radio beacon. I did estimated navigation. I did meteorology with barometer and a Nagrafax [a machine that received and print-ed maps of the local weather conditions for sailing]. Today, if you turn off the GPS in the middle of the sea, you don't know what can happen. Of course, as in all things, you gain in comfort but lose in know-how, and you also lose some freedom.

We are experiencing an epochal change. The environmental issue has become a drama. When I was a child there was tar on the beaches, which we managed to solve by putting a double hull on oil tankers, but today we are faced with other disasters: single-use plastic and the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere that turns into heat, also heating up the sea. Things are changing too fast and in a particularly crazy way.

Technology has helped us a lot in this, it has opened up many possibilities in terms of sustainability. With Maserati, we have built a boat, the Maserati Multi 70, that goes precisely in this direction. The internal combustion engine has been eliminated in favour of an electric one, although you can easily just sail. With our speeds we can in fact exploit apparent wind, i.e., wind that you create for yourself. Our energy comes from a solar panel system and a small 500-watt wind turbine. Right now, the boat is in Hawaii having completed half of a round-the-world voyage and at the end of the year we should arrive in the Canary Islands. At that point we will have completed a full world tour without consuming a single litre of petrol.

Freedom and the ability to go far with only the power of the wind. When you find yourself flying over the water at 40 knots, the adrenaline in such high-performance boats becomes a very strong emotion.

It is a special condition. You have a great deal of time to think. A great deal.

Yes, absolutely, you learn a lot. It becomes a stimulus to grow. First of all, you learn to forgive yourself, because when you are racing in general you also make a lot of mistakes and if you are alone, you can't blame anyone but yourself. Also, in solitude it's very difficult to make decisions, you don't have anyone to discuss things with. You have to be self-sufficient.

As a child I dreamed of becoming an airline pilot.

So many navigators of the past. I read [a book by the Italian sailor and adventurer] Ambrogio Fogar when I was a child and it made me dream. Later on, I had the opportunity to meet some of the great French sailors and I certainly treasured many of their ideas.

I've had the good fortune to live between one [great] sailing generation and the next. Certainly, however, sailing in the past was more complicated without today's technology. Many sailors found themselves racing in the Vendée Globe, a solo race which starts and finishes in the French port of Les Sables-d'Olonne, using only a sextant. It was another type of navigation with a know-how far removed from ours. I would probably take this from the old school of sailing.

My generation studies and keeps abreast of all technological developments, but the next generation was born with technology. They have a completely different approach.

Ambrogio Beccaria, 32, is the first Italian to have won the Mini Transat, a solo transatlantic race for the Mini 6.50 that starts in France and ends in the Caribbean. Aboard his latest Class 40 boat, Alla Grande Pirelli, he took part in the Route du Rhum in 2022, finishing second in his class, the only “non-French” sailor to make the podium. At the end of November 2023, he crossed the finish line first in the Transat Jacques Vabre – also known as Route du Café – alongside French co-skipper Nicolas Andrieu.

No one in my family is particularly passionate about sailing, so it really happened by chance [when I went out in a boat] one afternoon at a summer camp in Sardinia. There, I experienced the adrenaline of sailing, thanks to the Mistral that made me find out what it means to glide!

Water is an element that has always fascinated me, and I have tried to spend as much time as possible on it: first on the lake, then the Mediterranean and finally the ocean. It has always been a relationship of adventure and curiosity, obviously the relationship changes depending on how you experience it. In the beginning, when I worked on cruise ships, the sea was my office, then it became the place where I found my career and where I was trained in a broad sense. At sea I feel good, I am at ease: it is a continuous discovery.

I started sailing on the Mini 6.50, where using practically any type of technology was forbidden. To keep costs down, it wasn't possible to have satellite connection or on-board computers – the weather was communicated verbally via radio bulletin once a day, and even that didn't always work. I was in the pre-GPS era. Modern ocean navigation is very different, we sail with software that does routing and advises you on the ideal route by calculating the boat's performance and the weather forecast. Starting my career at sea without outside help, however, has helped me to let my instincts guide me. During the Route du Rhum I had problems with the wind sensors, which provide huge techno-logical help: it is at these moments that you have to know how to compensate for the absence of the machine with your human sensitivity.

Adrenaline, but not in the sense of extreme euphoria. My adrenaline rush can last up to 12 hours: it is a feeling that makes me feel extremely alive.

It can be a double-edged sword during regattas. One of the first pieces of advice my coach gave me was to try to reset my own emotional chart. You must not get caught up in either excitement or depression. The risk is having big mood swings since there is no one else there to share the experience with: it is something that is difficult to handle.

It is one of the sensations I like best. Being afraid, under-standing it and living with it. It is useful for me to try it as it leads me to decide on what to do at critical moments. Is there a route you haven't done yet that you would like to attempt? So many. Among the oceans I have only seen the northern part of the Atlantic, so I still have four-and-a-half oceans to go. I Would like to sail in Asia, in the Indian Ocean, at Cape Horn, to race in the Sydney-Hobart across Bass Strait in Australia.

I don't think I will stop until I have done at least one world tour. I just started sailing.

The “who” is Giovanni Soldini. As soon as I discovered sailing, I read his book about this life in constant pursuit of adventure. The “what” is that animal instinct that grows during navigation. You develop a different physical sensitivity, you feel the change in the weather, the clouds, the current, the sea. When You sail you learn to feel all this: you connect with the planet.

The feeling of being pioneers. Sailing is a young sport and when people first started practising and discovering it there was definitely a very strong sense of adventure, a bit like pirates.

Future generations will actually be confronted with different anxieties. What will the sea be like in 20 years and what will the routes be like? One positive thing I envy instead is what boats will be able to do in 20 years' time. They will be an incredible thing, somewhere between an aeroplane and a sailboat.