ARSANA has no propeller shafts. She runs four Volvo IPS pods, and on a 35.5-metre yacht that is close to heresy – which is precisely why Amer built her that way.
The conventional answer at this length is two big diesels turning two shafts through the hull at an angle. Amer’s answer is four smaller units hanging under the stern, each with its own counter-rotating propellers pulling rather than pushing, each steering independently. The pods sit outside the hull, so the engine room shrinks and the accommodation grows. The thrust runs horizontally instead of downward, so less of it is wasted. Permare quote roughly a third less fuel than a comparable shaftline 36-metre, and the reason the number is that large is that nothing about the installation is a compromise between old and new – she was drawn around the pods from the start.
What it means in a week: she cruises at 17 knots, tops out at 22, and burns like something much smaller. Docking is a joystick rather than a negotiation. And 245 gross tons on 35.5 metres is generous, because the volume the engine room gave up went into the yacht.
Stefano Tini drew the interior and it is the opposite of the dark Italian orthodoxy – white lacquer, pale oak, and a deep marine blue used with real discipline: blue upholstery, blue detailing, one wall of blue mosaic behind the dining table. Glass runs almost uninterrupted down both sides of the main deck. It reads as a 2023 yacht rather than a yacht in 2023, which is a harder thing to achieve than it sounds.
The master is full-beam and sits on the main deck, forward – the layout that suits multi-generational groups and the one most 35-metre yachts cannot offer. Four more cabins sit below, ten guests in total, each cabin in the same white-and-blue palette with its own en-suite. Six crew.
On deck there is a hot tub set into the sundeck teak, a shaded alfresco table, a foredeck lounge, and – unusually and very deliberately – a wine cellar. She carries a large Evoluzione tender with bolstered helm seats that is a serious boat in its own right.
Permare has built at Sanremo since 1973 and spent most of that time as a family yard making boats in the thirties of feet rather than the thirties of metres. The Amer 120 is what happens when a yard that size decides to make an argument instead of a flagship. Bigger builders had every reason not to commit to pods at this length – it obsoletes a lot of existing tooling and a lot of received wisdom about how a superyacht should be driven. Permare had no such reason, and ARSANA is the result: a yacht whose defining feature is a decision rather than a dimension.
Fraser lists her under a French flag, RINA-classed, with stabilisers.
She works the Mediterranean from April to September and is currently in Sardinia. Weekly rates run from 130,000 euros low season to 152,000 in high.
ARSANA is what happens when a yard commits to a propulsion idea rather than hedging it. If the quad-pod arrangement reads as unproven to you, she is not the yacht. If it reads as the obvious answer that everyone else is too conservative to build, she is the only one at this length that does it.
