Together with K-Way, we portrayed the essence and listened to the story of ocean sailor Ambrogio Beccaria. ‘Home’ is the first chapter of our journey into his aquatic universe, and the first stage of the documentary ‘How Far You Can Go’: a narrative regatta that we will accompany with special editorial focuses.

Home is where the heart is. It does not take much to strip of rhetoric one of the most famous phrases from pioneering writer, traveler and naturalist Pliny the Elder. Listen to the words of Ambrogio Beccaria, immerse yourself in an inverted biography that began between the asphalt borders of Milan’s Navigli and expanded outward into the cryptic yet welcoming horizons of the open ocean, its routes, and its many challenges.

For this ocean sailor, home is the hull of his nautical jewel ALLAGRANDE, and the incessant dance and sway of its sail. It is the feeling of inhabiting and, simultaneously, exploring the unknowns of the vast blue. It is the solitary, cyclical water-drenched migration applied to sports and competition. Both primordial necessity and modern vocation, it appeared by pure chance in the midst of adolescent chaos and ended up defining the future of the man who, today, is counted among the most talented sailors in the world.

“My passion for sailing was born by chance. I come from Milan and my family didn’t sail, but my parents passed on their passion for the sea. I remember endless vacations spent only on the beach…. Being from Genoa, my grandmother was the only one with true maritime origins. She used to tell me that when I was a child I would get into the water by walking backwards because I was afraid of the horizon. Sailing came when I was 11, thanks to a summer course my sister took in Sardinia. I imitated her, like I did so many other times, and the instructors really instilled a great passion in me. Sailing first became a way to escape Milan, to feel grown up among people more mature than me, then it allowed me to travel around Italy and earn my first paychecks. It was a kind of toy-land, a real form of independence. At 14-15 years old you ask yourself a lot of questions, especially in a city like Milan. Sailing gave me some answers.”

Where waves and clouds mirror each other and ultimately become one, the answers sought by this young sailor have been structured and clarified over time, becoming personal philosophical assumptions. If it is true that the wind, the noble master of aquatic immensity, erases all traces of human passage, its role as revelator is undeniable, its ability to inspire lashing epiphanies and fluid awarenesses. Those now inspire the exploits of a navigator capable of being both poet and scientist.

“Contact with the ocean is always in flux, I don’t have a fixed feeling about it. Lately, being in the middle of the sea changes my perceptions, my feelings, compared to when I am on land. In the water, the differences between human beings and nature, all those boundaries, those limits that are amplified by the contemporary world become thinner. I feel something wild that dwells within me. When this component comes out, it makes me feel good, it gives me a rhythm that is completely different. And it makes me feel at home. Being a sailor means doing a job that I know doesn’t make sense to society, but feeling like a sailor has given me a place in the world. Without this passion, I never would have discovered that the sea is where I really belong.”

This is a place, a dwelling with no specific address. But it refers to an ideal, the one encapsulated in ‘ALLAGRANDE’. ALLAGRANDE is a dialect joke that, over time, has taken on the connotations of gambling, taking risks, discovery, reality, even affirmation. It has become the meeting point in that process of communion between Beccaria and the sea currents, as well as the cornerstone of a dream mad reality by exceeding all expectations.   

“The name was born thanks to the shipworkers at the La Spezia shipyards. It was 2015, I was in my early 20s and was skippering a cruising catamaran. I was studying to become a navigator and bought a Mini 650, my first ocean-going boat that was 6.5 meters. It was a wreck salvaged in Portugal; I had no money to afford anything else. After work, I would spend hours at the shipyard refitting it. The carpenters, like all good Ligurians, kept teasing me. They kept asking me how my dream was going. I always answered, “Alla Grande!” (Great!) When it finally came time to launch, I decided that would be the perfect name.”

Follow us to discover the second chapter of ‘How Far You Can Go’.