entries Oct 2004
and Oct 2021
Two Ship
Owners
Achille Lauro (1887-1982) and Aldo Grimaldi (1922-2018)
Foreigners
familiar with the name "Achille Lauro" generally
know it as the name of an ill-fated ship. The keel was
laid in 1939 in the Netherlands, but the ship was not
launched until 1947. The original name was the
Willem Ruys; she was sold to the Lauro line in 1964, and
the name was changed to the Achille Lauro.Then came the notorious hijacking by the
Palestinian Liberation Organization in October of
1985. Subsequently, the passenger liner continued in
service until 1994 when she caught fire off the coast
of Somalia, was abandoned, and sank.
Neapolitans, however, remember the
eponym, himself: Achille Lauro, the shipping magnate —the
"Neapolitan Onassis," the "King of Naples," the Commandante
they called him —the wheeler-dealer millionaire and
popular mayor of Naples in the boom 1950s, owner of the
Naples football team, builder of beautiful fountains all
over town and, alas, overbuilder of row upon row of new,
anonymous flats. (One Lauro defender, Achille della
Ragione, author of a recent book entitled Achille
Lauro, Superstar, reminds
critics, however, that Lauro was not responsible
for one particularly egregious people warren on the Vomero
height overlooking via Aniello Falcone, an enormous block
of flats so ungainly that to this day locals call it "The
Great Wall of China.")
Lauro was born in 1887 in the town of
Piano di Sorrento. He attended a civilian maritime school
and inherited a first small coasting vessel in 1912. By
the outbreak of the Great War he had a small merchant
fleet, the ships of which were requisitioned by the state
for the war effort. He started anew and by 1933 had a
fleet of 21 ships. He joined the Fascist party in 1933. At
the beginning of WW II he put his considerable merchant
fleet of 57 ships at the disposal of the Italian war
effort. During the war he acquired 50% share in a number
of Neapolitan daily newspapers. He was arrested by the
Allies in 1943 and spent 22 months in jail. By the end of
the war his fleet had been reduced to five ships. He was
not found guilty of criminal activity and was released
from prison. In 1949 he went into the true passenger
business with the acquisition of a liner from the American
Grace Lines, renaming the ship Surriento, the
dialect spelling of "Sorrento." During
the 1950s he rebuilt his fleet to 50 ships.
He became the mayor of Naples in 1952,
winning re-election in 1956 and again in 1960. In 1972 he
was elected to parliament as a member of the Monarchist
party. (That may seem strange to those unfamiliar with
post-war Italy; a contested referendum in 1946 narrowly
chose to send the monarchy into exile and turn Italy into
a presidential republic. In Naples, however, the monarchy
carried the vote by a margin of 10 to 1.)
In the building frenzy of the 1950s,
Lauro was responsible for many of
the 80,000 new dwellings built in Naples, the construction
of the San Paolo football stadium in Fuori Grotta and a
new train station at Piazza Garibaldi.
In 1973 Lauro went into the oil tanker
business with the purchase of two supertankers, the Coraggio
and the Volere. In 1976, at the age of 89, he
founded Canale 21 in Naples, the first private TV station
in Europe. He lost his last electoral campaign in 1979. In
1981 financial troubles beset his empire. He died in 1982.
After his death his fleet was broken up and sold.
It is hard to get a neutral opinion on
Lauro. Like all self-made millionaires, he was ambitious
and knew how to get things done. He was mayor at a time
when the city was still recovering from the considerable
urban devastation of WW2. The port and industrial plant of
the city were ruined, and the population was over a
million and climbing. His critics accused him of being a qualunquista —an
Anythingarian— with a too pragmatic, "whatever-works"
approach to urban problems, one that led to rampant
overbuilding and corruption. His defenders claim that he
did what he had to do to revive the city. Me? I just live
here.
added Oct. 2021
GNV Ships and Aldo Grimaldi
GNV stands for
Grandi Navi Veloci
(abbr. GNV). That is, "Large Fast Ships." They are.
First, a shipowner is the owner of a merchant vessel. Not
the captain — the owner, the person who equips and exploits
the vessel for delivering cargo. Shipowners typically hire a
licensed crew and captain rather than take charge of the
vessel in person. GNV was created in 1992 by Aldo
Grimaldi (1922-2018) (image below). His family
was vital to the post-war Italian merchant marine (shipowner
Achille
Lauro was his uncle). Aldo got a university
degree in maritime economics and sciences and a ship
captain's license in Naples. His first "shipowning" was
recovering and refurbishing "Liberty
ships" left from WWII. The first GNV
ship, Majestic,
went into service in 1993 on the Genoa-Palermo route,
followed in 1994 by the Splendid on the Genoa-Porto
Torres (Sardinia) route. They were the first cruise ferries
ever operated by an Italian company.
The fleet was enlarged with new cruise
ferries through the 1990s. New routes were added, including
Livorno-Palermo, Genoa-Olbia and Genoa-Barcelona. In 2002
and 2003 the new, large cruise ferries La Superba
and La Suprema went into service. Lines for Tunisia
and a new Civitavecchia (Rome)-Palermo line, were opened. In
2008 the fleet was enlarged with three ro-ro (roll-on
roll-off) cargo ships and a new Genoa-Barcelona-Tangier line
was opened. In 2010 GNV opened new lines between Sète
(southern France), Tangier, and Nador (Morocco) and in 2015,
GNV opened a new line between Italy and Albania.The company
as of 2018 operates a fleet of thirteen cruise ferries,
including some of the largest ferries in Europe. Recently
GNV converted one of their ferries, Splendid (image
above), into a hospital ship in order to treat coronavirus
patients. The ship was delivered to Liguria, Italy, on 23
March 2020, for the symbolic cost of 1 EUR. With help from a
number of local and national companies, who donated time,
materials, and expertise, Splendid was converted
into a hospital ship in 10 days.
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