It was 1965 when Gruppo Franza decided to venture into the shipping business, setting up Tourist Ferry Boat, a maritime transport company which, together with its Calabrian counterpart Caronte, represented the first real alternative to the Ferrovie dello Stato state railways in the Messina/Reggio Calabria maritime connection.
In 2003, the merger of these two giants of the strait resulted in the creation of Caronte & Tourist, a renowned private shipping company that transports 6 million passengers every year.
30 ships and more than 1,200 employees for over 2 million cars and 650,000 commercial vehicles transported every year.
Numbers which, divided between fast ferry crossings over the Straits of Messina, cabotage on the Salerno-Messina line and connections with the smaller islands, today make Caronte & Tourist one of the largest, most efficient and safest fleets in Europe.
The first LNG ferry in service in the Mediterranean
The flagship of its shipping division, Elio: the first liquefied natural gas (LNG)-powered motor vessel to operate in the Mediterranean, the symbol of the Group’s new course towards a sustainable mobility model.
Adoption of environmentally-friendly dual-fuel and diesel + LNG engines, total particulate abatement and silicone paint with a low percentage of environmentally-harmful biocides are some of its zero-impact features.
On 12 April 2016 in Palermo, from the Sala dei Baroni of Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, Caronte & Tourist Isole Minori officialised the acquisition of Siremar, a long-standing Sicilian shipping company that operates in five distinct areas between Sicily and the smaller islands: the Aeolian Islands, with a round-trip service to Naples, the islands of Ustica and Pantelleria, and the Aegadian and Pelagie archipelagos.
It was 2001 when Caronte & Tourist launched Autostrade d’Amare, a project connecting goods and people between the ports of Messina and Salerno.
The star of this new route was the Cartour Delta, a state-of-the-art ship with a capacity of 600/1000 passengers and room in the hold for 800 cars or 150 commercial vehicles. The only one capable of making a round trip in 24 hours, with a journey time of around seven and a half hours.
On board: comfortable single, double, triple and quadruple cabins, lounges with numbered reclining seats, lift, bar, restaurant and shops.
A ship and a route that enabled Caronte & Tourist to become an ever greater point of reference in sea connections for central and southern Italy.
