It was the year 2001, and I was living in Ancona, in the Marche region of Italy. I worked as a house painter, and one day my colleague and I were painting an apartment completely empty of furniture, so our voices echoed through all the rooms and I was telling him about my doubts about life; we were both in the same room when he said:
“Piero, why don’t you get your boating license and travel around the world?”
In silence, I kept thinking…
I found a naval architect in Florence named Rodolfo Foschi. He told me that in Livorno, also in Tuscany, a friend of his was building a steel sailing boat based on one of his designs, in a shipyard along the Arno River floodway. The model was called Tamatino.
I went to Livorno and, some time after our conversation, I decided to begin building what would eventually become Flesh, my steel boat with a spruce mast. Building a boat takes a huge amount of work, but it comes with a few small advantages—one of them is that you end up knowing your boat inside out. And when it came time to rig the main mast, an interesting story emerged…
Where was I supposed to find a 12‑meter mast? I remember walking down the road toward the lumber depot, full of curiosity, when I passed through a forest. Smiling to myself, I thought that if things got desperate, I could always cut down one of those trees. At the depot I found a wooden beam that could be shaped to fit my boat, so I bought it.
After the launch, when I began sailing among the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea, something almost mystical started happening in the ports where I stopped. A bond formed between Flesh and her mast—something similar to the affection one might feel for a horse, even if the comparison isn’t perfect.
I got my boating license and learned the basics of chartwork, but I was still just a beginner…
During my early sailing days, I gave my body to the boat, and I studied the Glenans Sailing Manual to fill in the gaps in my knowledge—sometimes I kept it on my bedside table at night.
Then one day, sailing toward the island of Elba with all sails full of wind, Flesh began giving back to me what I had given her. What I had invested in her returned as pure joy and ease.
Since I was a child, I had rowed up and down the coastline near the campground where my family spent summers. And now, suddenly, I found myself a sailor of the open sea.
