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"You can't sail around the world to win a race. You have to do it for the pleasure of doing it, and only then can you have the serenity you need to win as well."
Episode 1 · July 7, 2025 · 51min
At 17 I ran away from home. At 33 I won the solo round-the-world race
In Buona Compagnia is an Italian podcast. This is the English version of the episode: the video has English subtitles, and the transcript, reflections and sources are translated. Nel Blu has never been published in English, so the quotes from the book are our own translation from the Italian. Versione italiana →
Giovanni Soldini is the first Italian to win the solo round-the-world race: on 8 May 1999, after 116 days and 20 hours at sea. Nel Blu is his autobiography.
Milan, January 1983. A seventeen-year-old boy runs away from home. School and a future already written for him are suffocating him. He wants to learn to sail. With a friend, he travels across Italy all the way to Sicily, where to survive they start making and selling earrings. When he gets back to Milan a few weeks later, he has 800,000 lire in his pocket and one certainty: he wants to wake up in the morning happy about what is waiting for him during the day.
Six years later he is in Newport to buy his first racing boat, a 50-footer he will call Looping. Three years later Looping capsizes in the Atlantic during a race and is lost. Four years later he builds a new boat together with a community of former drug addicts. They call it Stupefacente. With it he wins his first leg in a round-the-world race, but Kodak withdraws its sponsorship before the final leg. Then he loses a friend at sea during a record attempt. Then he goes back to sea, and in 1999 he wins the solo round-the-world race, the first Italian in history to do so.
What separates the seventeen-year-old running away from Milan from the racer who crosses the line first in Charleston is one thing only: he never gave up. Not when Looping is lost in the Atlantic, not when a friend dies at sea, not when the sponsor abandons him in the middle of a round-the-world race. Nel Blu is the story of what it takes for anyone who wants to chase something that, at 17, seemed impossible.
At 17 I ran away from home. At 33 I won the solo round-the-world race
Giovanni Soldini
0:00 51:56
At 17 I ran away from home. At 33 I won the solo round-the-world race
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At 17 I ran away from home. At 33 I won the solo round-the-world race
Ten key reflections from the episode
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"Sailing solo brings out a part of us that we usually keep hidden, because bringing it out usually takes effort, and nobody ever feels like making an effort."
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The worst thing you can do is pretend nothing is happening.
"Sometimes we humans are strange, and our body often tells us things that by now are clear signals for us, but we pretend nothing is happening anyway, out of laziness."
You have to face the truth and do everything you can to solve the problems it may cause.
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"When you're alone the mind is fundamental. If our brain can count on any excuse to accept a defeat, the defeat automatically becomes certain."
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"Fear passes and leaves room for the need to solve problems."
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"Man is always most afraid of what he doesn't know, and the first time you face a southern ocean you're scared as hell."
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"When you're excited about doing something, the energy not only attracts the right people, but somehow you manage to convince anyone."
This happens because you have not just passion, but an energy so big and positive that people believe you and start rooting for you.
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If you do something well enough and for long enough, you make it prestigious. Being a sailor is not prestigious at all, but after years of sacrifice Soldini is now considered one of the most important and strongest sailors in the world. If you do something for a long time, you make it prestigious. And that's how Soldini made his work prestigious.
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Is there a problem? "If it doesn't go against the laws of physics, there's always a solution."
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When people don't believe in you? Don't give a damn.
Soldini managed to build a sailing boat with a community of drug addicts. Even though everyone thought it was impossible, he pulled it off. In the end he decided to call it "Stupefacente", precisely because of everyone's amazement at seeing the boat finished.
