2008. Ciccio Manzoli Story

He is a 51-year-old man of medium height, with an affable and determined look and build to which the appellation “Ciccio” Manzoli fits like a glove. But then, how did an ordinary guy with a potbelly and a secure job in Dad’s company become one of Italy’s greatest sailors?

Franco “Ciccio” Manzoli is a Milanese, a “citizen” like many, a person who keeps the memory of the sea locked in his head as a somewhat romantic idea at all times of the year. And perhaps it is precisely because of the distance if the “passion” and the “need” of the sea grew stronger and stronger, prompting Franco to leave his job in the family print shop and move to the Ligurian hinterland, designing trees and accomplishing great feats.

Aboard a Dinghy

“My grandparents had a house in Rapallo,” Manzoli begins, “and from April onward we spent most of our weekends at their place. When I was fourteen, my father thought well of combining the useful with the delightful and gave me a Dinghy, but since neither he nor anyone in my family was a sailor, he decided to equip it with an outboard motor.” Try now to close your eyes and imagine young “Fatty” on his motorized 12-footer, the Lampuga II, from the Patrone shipyards, sold by Guido Carbone and kept at the Bristol baths, frolicking around the Gulf of Tigullio-isn’t that an ideal beginning for a story like ours? These are the formative years for the young Milanese, with the Lampuga IIhe in fact takes part in his first regattas and, more importantly, begins to “know” the sea, falling more and more in love with it. “I was around all day, sometimes it even happened that the wind would run out and my parents would come to pick me up in the middle of the sea.” Young Manzoli is getting the hang of it, sailing with Ettore Savorelli and Giancarla Mursia on the Rai Reva, a 15-meter ketch that was in Giannutri; at 17 he was an instructor in Caprera, and at 20 he participated in the Mini Ton Cup in Cala Galera. The time really came for the first boat. “Boat not really,” Franco adds. “We bought a minitonner shell (about 7 meters long, ed.) from Vallicelli and then completed it with my brother Maurizio in the garage.” However, we must not forget that the saying “no one is born learned” is always valid, and while even our young boy seems set for a great sailing career, there is no shortage of unforeseen events, as he tells us in this tragicomic episode; “It was late afternoon, and I was aboard Santarelli’s S9, a wooden 9-meter, and as we left the Rapallo harbor we were capsized by a wave, only to end up stranded on the beach like a whale. Looking back, the paradox was all in the name of that boat ‘Rosso di Sera’….”

Things are getting serious

It is 1981, Franco is 25 years old and he and Maurizio buy the fifth class half tonner “Watch out for those two” (designed by Fontana, Maletto and Navone). For a change, it is a shell that will be prepared by the two brothers for theAthens Half Tonner Cup selections held the following year. The Manzolis qualify for the world championship. “It was a good performance, given also our limited financial resources. We reached Athens by sea and returned to Rapallo by sea and returned to Rapallo only thanks to a radiogoniometer good only for listening to soccer games on Sundays.” It is time for an indiscreet question, but one that will be of interest, I think, to readers: “Where did you find the money needed for the regattas? For young people like you, the costs of competitive sailing at that level….” “It was not easy” – Franco recalls -. “we saved on everything to start with, then worked in the printing shop. Grandma also made us Bots in her name, which we sold almost immediately to finance ourselves, and finally, at Christmas, we would ask friends and relatives for items for the boat, hoping that Santa Claus would also be a lover of sailing… ” . Setting aside the problem of money, which is moreover not new to young people, let us return to Manzoli‘s story: so we are at the end of the Half Tonner championship and Franco is noticed by a French shipowner who offers him his first ocean crossing, with a transalpine boat and crew; departure from the Canary Islands and arrival in Martinique. The ocean, an endless sea, the end of the world for the ancients, what emotions it can arouse in a boy crossing it for the first time. “The boat was equipped with the latest technology and it was so big that it looked like a ship, I feel more excitement thinking about the Mediterranean, where on nice north wind days I can look at Corsica from the Ligurian coast, thinking about how small the sea around us is. One particular memory I have, though, is that of the captain, a fussy person, very fussy, nicknamed ‘Pa con sa,’ not like that, because nothing was ever right with him.” On his return from the expedition, Ciccio Manzoli met Captain Salata, a legendary sailor and owner of a company, Velscaf, specializing in mast production. That was the turning point; he took over the commander’s company and in ’83 moved to Carasco to start the new business.

leggi anche

1985. The sails of the future are being born. The GdV is in, with Lowell North

The Ganbare

The Ganbare (11 meters short) is a legendary boat, a One Tonner designed by Doug Peterson in 1973 and considered by many to be the progenitor of the modern generation of offshore racing boats. Her story is now legend, moral winner in ’73 of the One Ton Cup (champion became the famous Straulino with Hydra), he is disqualified for turning the wrong way around the buoy in Reale Bay in front of Asinara. Shortly thereafter he is sold to Giorgio Carriero, also owner of the very strong first class IOR Mandrake, who years later “parked” it in the Castagnola shipyards in Lavagna, until, in 1988, Mr. Castagnola, needing to renovate the shed that houses it, sold the famous boat at a favorable price to Maurizio Manzoli (as long as he paid him for the long parking space) who – Ciccio Manzoli tells us – took the “jewel” to Chiavari to repair it (or redo it, since it was in desperate condition). The Ganbare thus returned in splendid shape thanks to the Ciccio Manzoli ‘s care and in a short time became the “terror of Tigullio,” winning, with Franco, Maurizio and a group of friends aboard, most of the regattas he competed in:“She was really a great boat, especially upwind.”