ARTEXPLORER is 46.5 metres long and 17.1 metres wide. She is a sailing catamaran, she has a swimming pool, and Perini Navi built her in 2024. There is nothing else remotely like her available to charter.
Start with the beam, because everything follows from it. Seventeen metres across on a 46-metre hull is a proportion no monohull can approach – roughly double what a conventional yacht of her length carries. That width is not vanity. It is deck: a main deck so broad it reads as a terrace rather than a boat, wide enough to carry a full pool amidships, a dining table for twelve, and separate lounging areas that do not overhear each other. On a monohull those things compete for the same square metres. Here they simply coexist.
And she sails. Two masts, a proper rig, aluminium hulls, 498 gross tons moving at 11 knots under canvas with 13 available. Catamarans of this size are almost always motor yachts wearing a second hull for the volume. Perini Navi has spent forty years building the largest sailing yachts in the world, and ARTEXPLORER is that expertise applied to a platform the yard had never used. The result is a boat that behaves like a Perini and lives like a resort.
The interior splits in two, and the split is the surprise. The main saloon is cream and ivory under a full-length skylight – bright, low, and about as wide as a tennis court. Step aft and it turns: the dining room, the library and every cabin are deep varnished mahogany, close-grained and hand-finished, more classic Perini than modern multihull. The library has red walls, built-in shelving and a chess table. Six cabins sleep twelve, split across the hulls, each in the same timber with a porthole at eye level from the bed.
On deck: the pool, glass-sided and set into the teak. Shaded lounging under the boom. A helm station that looks like a cockpit. Tenders and an eFoil off the transom. At night the underwater lights turn the water beneath her violet and she is, without much argument, the most striking thing in any anchorage she enters.
There is a real question hanging over her that deserves an answer rather than a dodge. Perini Navi went through bankruptcy and was bought by The Italian Sea Group in 2022; ARTEXPLORER is among the first hulls delivered under the new ownership. Whether the name still means what it meant when the yard was launching Maltese Falcon is a fair thing to ask. On the evidence of this boat, the engineering culture survived the balance sheet: the rig is serious, the aluminium work is Perini work, and nobody builds a 17-metre-wide sailing platform as a marketing exercise.
The other honest note: a catamaran does not sail like a Perini monohull and never will. She is stiff, flat, fast off the wind and unromantic on it. If the appeal of a sailing yacht is the heel and the groove, she is the wrong boat. If it is arriving somewhere under canvas with twelve people who all have somewhere to sit, there is nothing else in the size.
Eight crew for twelve guests. She works the Mediterranean from April to September at 240,000 euros; winter is on request.
ARTEXPLORER is what happens when a yard with nothing to prove tries something it has never done. The obvious criticism – that a catamaran is not a real sailing yacht – does not survive contact with her. She is simply the widest, brightest, most usable 46 metres on the water.
