Genoa – “My father Odoardo Amoretti had a middle school diploma as his highest level of education. He started working as a truck driver in my grandfather’s company and in 1948 he founded our family business by opening the first service station on the via Emilia because he had understood that there would be an economic boom in the Post-War period. In the following years he opened dozens of other service stations, depots, then the business evolved into a fuel distribution company with a fleet of articulated trucks that shuttled between Porto Marghera and Parma. One day he thought that, if he had exploited fresh water (the Po river, ed.), he would have saved on costs and made this logistics more efficient, so the truck fleet was replaced by a river fleet. From fresh water, the move was then to the sea.”
With this memory, Mariella Amoretti, CEO of Amoretti Armatori, summarizes the birth and development of a group that, born in the middle of the last century with a refueling station near Parma, has evolved over the decades to the point of now controlling and managing a fleet of 11 tanker ships active internationally (especially in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe) through the companies Marittima Emiliana (in 2024 over 29 million in revenue and 9 million in net profit) and Marittima Etnea (24 million in revenue and almost 3 million in profit).
Admitting that she was “rather dragged” to Genoa (she is notoriously very low profile in the media) by her friend Carlo Cameli for the public interview organized at the Galata Museo del Mare as part of the ‘Incontri in Blu’, Mariella Amoretti retraced the stages of a professional life that led her to receive the title of Cavaliere del Lavoro from the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella two years ago, after being the first female shipowner to enter the Executive Board of Confitarma in the early 2000s, as well as (currently) the association’s first vice president. In 2023, for a few months, she had also been the interim president of the Confederazione Italiana Armatori.
“Neither in the company, nor in Confitarma, nor in the market have I ever held back, I have earned respect by doing things. Shipping is a male world? With patience, I got them all used to the presence of a woman in the sector. To do this job you need great passion and perseverance,” she recounted. “At the negotiating table, it didn’t matter that I was a woman, I never had problems because I brought the seriousness of my company. You also have to know how to turn things in a positive way. Traveling the world, everyone remembered me in this environment as I was one of the very few women.”
One of the peculiarities of Amoretti Armatori is precisely the fact that almost all of the top management is female: her sister Rina holds the role of president, her daughter Costanza is fleet manager and Marialaura is administration manager. Mariella Amoretti has a degree in law because her father Odoardo, in addition to her daughter Rina who was already handling accounting, needed someone to handle legal aspects. “When we were little, our father sent us to the Post Office to send registered letters, then I also took care of accounting, insurance, etc.”
“My father gave space but it was forbidden to make mistakes,” recalls the Emilian shipowner.
Odoardo Amoretti complained “because the Po river was not maintained, the barges had too deep a draft, so he created a project to convert a ship from river to sea and with that he went to Rome to an oil major, going to the first floor where the maritime transport office was. He knew that ship would be suitable for serving a port in the Adriatic with a shallow draft, so he left that office with in his pocket what was the first time charter contract for a ship in our group.” Over the years the family also managed a shipyard on the Po where the various lateral vessels were built, but, once they chose to aim for the sea with naval investments, navigation on the Po was definitively shelved. Some of the company’s key historical steps have been: barges for river transport, ships for maritime transport and then the purchase of six sister ships for the Northern European market (the internationalization of the company). In the 1990s Odoardo Amoretti was among the first to conceive double-hull ships.
“He was a great worker, he always worked,” his daughter recalled. “He said that if you get used to not taking vacations, then you don’t miss them. In the summer he would take the family on vacation to Forte dei Marmi and he would return to Parma to work. For us daughters, the dream was to work in our father’s company. We always knew what was happening in the company because at the dinner table we always heard talk about it.”
During the interview, the topic of the few women in top positions in the shipping world could not be avoided. “In Italy perhaps it is like that, but abroad there are, in Greece and in Northern Europe there are many. Perhaps in Italy there are few shipping companies in general. It’s a stereotype, it takes a lot of patience and passion.” She also joked about the fact that her father “had no alternative with two daughters but to entrust the company to us. I was privileged nonetheless because I found a traced line that we followed. The true entrepreneur was my father.” The advice to new generations is to “set no limits if one has an idea and wants to realize it, but it takes great passion.”
Rewinding the tape of her professional life, Mariella Amoretti recalls in particular the day she was appointed Knight of Labor: “A recognition that pleased me very much and that I did not expect. It was an important moment and that day, perhaps for the first time, I began to think that I had done something good; until that moment it had seemed to me that I had simply carried on the family business. I have had an entrepreneurial life that was tough at times, many satisfactions, a beautiful family and a company that, despite the winds that have blown after 2008, passed unscathed through a moment of serious crisis for many without even having had to restructure its debt.”
She gets along very well with her sister Rina; in the meeting room, they are the two who sit at the head of the table, they have been great allies “to best develop a company to leave to future generations.
Her husband, who works as a surgeon, has also been very supportive in managing family matters, and Mariella Amoretti says she has been more understanding towards her daughters than her father had been with them.
Finally, analyzing the current moment in international shipping, the number one of Amoretti Armatori said: “We are navigating by sight, it is a difficult geopolitical moment. Europe has burdened us with compliance and supplementary costs for ETS and FuelEU which take away money and a lot of time; not to mention the international sanctions for which we had to create a dedicated office because we have to be very careful and perform clearance of the counterparts we work with. In short, the job is increasingly difficult.”
Her father, Odoardo Amoretti, preferred to rename ships only with women’s names and did not want a ship dedicated to him but, when he passed away in 2008, his daughters chose to ‘disobey’ this instruction by naming a tanker that entered the fleet in 2012 in his memory. “He had said not to have ships with his name, but when he passed away we chose to do what we wanted. One gets used to having a ship named after them and, when for some reason you don’t have it anymore, you miss it a little. At the moment, two ships named after my daughters Costanza and Marialaura are missing, but we will provide for it…”.
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Mariella and Rina Amoretti
Mariella Amoretti
