A few days ago I took part in Porto Marghera in the delivery by Fincantieri, the company led by Giuseppe Bono, of the cruise ship "Nieuw Statendam" to the Holland American Line company, a brand of the international group Carnival Corporation, the largest operator in the world of cruise industry.
It is the sixteenth ship that Fincantieri (which has orders for 104 ships in its portfolio) has delivered to this company.
But in addition to these important numbers, I would like to tell you what I saw and the sensations I had while visiting all the compartments of the ship with the chief naval designer, Maurizio Cergol from Trieste, considered one of the world's leading experts in the sector.
I found myself immersed in a plant engineering and production system that I would dare to define as a floating "Smart City". A huge set of connections and sensors all in synergy with each other and optimized by a computer network that allows continuous control and governance.
Everything is connected: from mechanics, to engines, to driving, to the energy produced, to environmental control and everything that happens below and above the ship. A completely different thing from a set of hulls, propellers and furnishings of which liners were made up until the second half of the last century.
What is striking about Fincantieri, in addition to its mechanical and logistical capabilities that we all have the opportunity to see in the photos and videos of some events in which it is the protagonist, what is "behind" and "inside", i.e. its plant engineering capacity and connections that make it a producer of floating cities with all services controlled and managed by highly advanced central systems. Given my past experiences in large industrial groups, a modern cruise ship appeared to me as a "Complex System" such as, for example, the nuclear power plants that our country had designed and was preparing to build with very innovative criteria in the 70s and 80.
One of the consequences that arose from the closure of nuclear power in Italy was the disappearance, I would say the waste, of all those very valuable skills (engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians…) which were giving life to the national nuclear industry.
In Porto Marghera I experienced first-hand that this ability, despite everything, is still vital and does not fail to manifest itself at the highest levels if and when there is a company which, with a keen eye for strategic purposes, commits itself and invests in the aggregation of many skills to achieve an excellence with which to excel in the world. For this reason, I returned to Rome a little more optimistic about the industrial future of our country and it seemed appropriate to share this optimism and the occasion that fueled it with readers.
