On board the 27-metre Maestro 88 Gipsy VI with Matteo Rigamonti

BORN 1965
OCCUPATION PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, WEERG
FIRST MOTOR YACHT A BAVARIA 32
CURRENT YACHT 27-METRE GIPSY VI

Standing still isn’t Matteo Rigamonti’s thing. “When I see an opportunity, I start a company,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to buy one that’s already been made – I have to create.” The entrepreneur, most recently owner of Italian 3D-printing company Weerg, has launched many businesses over three decades.

“I dreamed of being a businessman since I was 12 and started my first venture when I was 19,” he says. Now 60, he takes on each new yacht project with gusto but always with an eye on what might be coming round the corner. “The way I think of it, I get on the bus, but I don’t stay on it till the end of the line,” he says. “I get off when I get bored.”

Given his restless spirit, it’s little wonder that he’s also an avid boater. The Venetian-born Rigamonti has owned boats since the early 2000s, and he regularly spends his leisure time cruising around the Mediterranean. As in his professional life, the only thing Rigamonti appears to enjoy more than being on a yacht is dreaming up a new one – which is why, three years ago, he turned to his long-time friends and collaborators at the Apreamare shipyard in the Italian region of Campania for his latest pleasure craft, the Maestro 88.

Gipsy VI made her public debut in Genoa following her delivery in the autumn of 2024, and she’s since found a special place in her owner’s heart. “It’s like trying to explain love,” Rigamonti says. “It’s always something different than your expectations.” Yachting, and the urge to explore in general, has long been in Rigamonti’s bloodstream. “I love boats because I was born in Venice,” he says. “To be born in that city is, metaphorically, to be born in a boat.”

Rigamonti also spent plenty of time on literal boats as well, beginning with family cruises across the Adriatic to Croatia; at one point he contemplated even greater voyages, aspiring to become an astronaut until he discovered physics wasn’t his forte. Instead, he pursued a degree in economics and acquired a small sailing boat – though he quickly found that the time commitment it entailed detracted from the experience.

He also, in short order, found himself a father of small children, and says “it made sense” from a safety perspective to stick to motor yachts. He was in his late forties when he clapped eyes on the Maestro 66, then one of the largest offerings from legacy boatbuilder Apreamare.

Celebrated for its elegant, understated gozzi (made to recall the traditional Neapolitan fishing boats), the brand has gone through a significant evolution over the last couple of decades, becoming part of international behemoth the Ferretti Group in 2001 only to be reacquired by the Aprea family nine years later.

“We started the Maestro line in 2005,” Giovanni Aprea says. Alongside his father, Cataldo, the fifth-generation co-owner of the company has been using the Maestro line as a chance to show that the historic brand can compete on a large scale as well as with its smaller, traditional offerings.

It dabbled with some success in the US, even creating a model for this market in 2011 and exhibited at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. The Maestro 66 made a believer of Rigamonti, but as he was not quite able to make it work financially, he acquired a Maestro 56 on the brokerage market in a rare moment of compromise for the uncompromising entrepreneur.

Rigamonti held onto the used boat for nearly a decade while growing his previous printing business and dabbling in real estate. By 2022, his cash reserves had reached the requisite level – and just in time: though he’d owned the 56 longer than any other boat to date, he was ready to let go. “Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, I get bored of everything,” he says.

He was drawn not only to Apreamare’s aesthetics (“When I see one of their motor yachts,” he says, “I think, this is not just a boat; this is art”) but also to the people and history behind the brand, founded in 1869. Far as it is from his native Venice, the Apreas’ hometown of Naples holds a romantic appeal. “Only real gentlemen and real criminals are from Naples,” says Rigamonti.

Over the years, Rigamonti has cultivated a strong relationship with the family, which made it easy to approach them and encourage them to develop a new, larger model to fit his needs, after he had considered and ruled out building a Maestro 82. “I said to Giovanni and Cataldo, ‘This is an old boat. I think now might be the right moment for a new Maestro.’”

The yard readily agreed. The new boat, which would become the brand’s new flagship, started with a series of drawings from yacht designer Marco Casali with additional input from naval architect Umberto Tagliavini.

In outline, the boat is close to what the Italians call a “navetta” (a cruiser). In line with Rigamonti’s desire for lengthy, relatively swift cruising, the team opted for a semi-planing hull, giving the 88 both high performance (capable of speeds up to 22 knots) and ample interior space for living and storage.

“We are really proud that, in the yachting business, there’s no other custom yacht of this size,” Giovanni Aprea says. With four cabins, furniture by Poltrona Frau, and even space for the owner’s electric piano, the 88 represents a big step forward for Apreamare as a maker of luxury boats. Apreamare’s new refit service in Sorrento for its yachts is another sign of their determination to expand its presence in the big-boat sector.

In that regard, its selection of the 88 as its new flagship makes sense, providing the company with a bold new face; yet at least with Gipsy VI – so named for the boat that Rigamonti’s father’s owned decades ago – the face is still recognisably that of its owner.

Perhaps most noticeable to the casual dockside onlooker is the 88’s striking blue-and-grey exterior palette, set off with a baby-blue boot stripe and contrasting light teak decking: a visual combination that exudes a breezy, confident air, altogether befitting its owner’s personality.

For Rigamonti, the features that make the yacht most appealing are the ones that he insisted on, though these are relatively few. The decision to place the galley below decks is one. “That’s why the main saloon is free and open, with a lot of windows,” he says, providing unencumbered views of the sea.

The owner was also keen to provide space for an extra-large engine room, affording better access for crew as well as a little more space between his own cabin and the noisy pumping of the two, 2,000-horsepower MAN V12 engines. “Ultimately,” Rigamonti says, “I had only one need: the need for delight.”

With a premium on light, space and quiet, Rigamonti was content to let Aprea take the lead, interfering as little as possible and waiting to see the final product. That meant waiting a little longer than he had anticipated: the completion of the Maestro 88 was delayed by several months, and the owner and builder were still working out the kinks when she arrived in Genoa in September 2024.

But according to Rigamonti, such minor hurdles are all part of the process. “A boat isn’t like a Mercedes; it’s a kind of living creature,” he says. “Nothing works perfectly the first time around.”

By his typical, excitable standards, Rigamonti seems surprisingly content with where he is now. When the 88 was delivered, the businessman immediately thought of his Venetian father, who had to give up his beloved Gipsy after fuel prices skyrocketed in the 1970s.

“I wish he was close to me then, to show him what we had done,” Rigamonti says. (His own children may take a little persuading: when he presented the completed boat to his adult daughter, her response was less enthusiasm than shock. “Daddy,” she said, “what did you do?”)

For Rigamonti, completing the project is its own reward, and he appears to have few regrets – not to say he hasn’t thought of how he might do things differently next time. “There are things I would change,” he says. But if he does build another boat, he says he’ll do it with Apreamare.

First published in the March 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.