Codecasa made its name in heavy displacement steel. ABILITY is aluminium, she planes, and she touches 30 knots – the outlier in her own yard’s catalogue, and the reason she reads differently from everything else at 42 metres.
The weight tells the story. Two hundred and eighty-six gross tons across 42 metres and an 8-metre beam is light for her length, and the hull underneath is cut for speed rather than for volume. She holds 18 knots without effort and opens up to 30 when the water allows. Her draft is shallow enough to tuck into bays that deeper 42-metre yachts have to admire from outside. On a coast like the Adriatic, where the good anchorages are small and the distances between them are not, that combination decides how much of a week you actually spend at anchor.
Her exterior states the case plainly: a low gunmetal hull, a raked bow and almost no visual bulk above the sheer. Then you step inside, and she does the opposite of what the profile promised.
The interior is unapologetically Italian and unapologetically traditional – figured burl panelling wrapped across every bulkhead, gold fittings in the bathrooms, marble counters, deep cream carpet. Against that, the owners hung contemporary pop art: bright, loud canvases that have no business working in a burl-lined salon and somehow do. The formal dining table sits directly beneath one of them. It is the most interesting room aboard, precisely because nobody smoothed the contrast away.
A 2023 refit went through her systems and finishes, and a fresh hull and superstructure repaint followed in 2025, which is why a yacht delivered in 2007 still photographs like a much younger one.
Five cabins sleep eleven. The master runs full-beam with portholes down both sides, a wall-mounted screen and a marble bathroom with a tub. Four more cabins follow the same specification below, doubles and twins finished in the same burl, each with its own en-suite. Eight crew look after eleven guests, and the galley is run by Rene, a chef IYC rates among the strongest in their fleet.
On deck she is built for daylight. The sundeck carries loungers under a bimini with the helm forward, the aft deck seats the full party around a single oval table, and the bow opens into a circular sunpad that becomes the quietest place aboard once the engines stop. Off the transom: a five-metre jet tender, a Sea-Doo, a Seabob F5S, three towables, paddleboards, a two-seat kayak, a wakeboard and waterskis.
Codecasa has built yachts in Viareggio since 1825, which makes ABILITY a departure rather than an experiment – the yard knew exactly what it was doing when it swapped steel for aluminium and gave her a planing bottom. Eighteen years and two refits later, the decision still reads as the right one. She is the rare fast yacht that has aged into her looks rather than out of them.
She works the East Mediterranean and Adriatic in both seasons. Weekly rates run from 110,000 to 125,000 euros.
ABILITY is a fast yacht with a traditional heart, and she does not pretend otherwise. That is the point of her.
