CRN launched BELLA STELLA in 1987. She has a water slide off the upper deck, a dedicated gym and a home cinema, and none of those things existed on a yacht when she was built. That is the point of her: a 45-metre aluminium hull from the era of the fax machine, kept relentlessly current, and now carrying equipment her original owner could not have imagined.
The 2025 refit is the most recent of many, and it is the one that matters. New gym on the upper deck. Reworked interior. Extra stabiliser fins added to the zero-speed system, so she sits flat at anchor as well as underway – the single most valuable upgrade you can make to a hull of this vintage, and the one that decides whether a week aboard is comfortable or endured.
Aldo Cichero drew her, 45 metres on an 8.41-metre beam, 416 gross tons of aluminium. She cruises at 14 knots and tops out at 17. Nobody charters her for the speed. They charter her for the volume, because a 1987 45-metre carries her tonnage differently from a modern one: deeper bulwarks, longer foredeck, a wheelhouse that sits where a designer put it rather than where a stylist wanted it. She looks like a ship. Most yachts her size now look like buildings.
Seven cabins sleep twelve, and IYC calls the layout flexible for good reason – the configuration bends around who is actually coming, rather than forcing a group to fit it. Ten crew look after those twelve. On a yacht this age that ratio is not indulgence; it is what it takes to run her properly.
Her interior is warm birdseye maple throughout, cream upholstery, marble in the bathrooms. It is unmistakably of its decade, and the refits have kept it honest rather than trying to make it look like 2025. The main salon runs into a formal dining room seating twelve. Above, an upper lounge doubles as the cinema. Forward of that, the gym.
Outside, the jacuzzi deck is the centre of gravity – a large relaxation area wrapped around the tub with clear water on three sides. The aft decks seat the full party twice over. And then there is the slide, custom-built, running from the upper deck into the sea, which is a genuinely uncommon thing to find on a yacht of this generation and tells you what her owners think she is for.
Her toy list is long: a 7m Zodiac RIB, a 4.8m Fost tender, two Sea-Doo Spark Trixx, two Seabobs, a Subwing Shark, four tubes, a three-seat sofa, a wakeboard, two hardshell kayaks each sized for an adult plus a small child, four inflatable paddleboards and two sets of Jobe waterskis.
CRN has built at Ancona since 1963, and BELLA STELLA belongs to the period before the yard became a Ferretti brand and started building to a house style. She is a one-off from a yard that was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and she has spent thirty-nine years being brought forward one refit at a time. The alternative reading is that she is simply old. Both are true. Which one governs depends on whether a hull that was overbuilt in 1987 reads to you as an asset or a liability – and after the 2025 work, it should read as the former.
She works the East Mediterranean and Adriatic in both seasons. Weekly rates run from 139,000 to 159,000 euros.
