we who are of a certain age remember, with nostalgia, the times when “shipping” was an art and to load a ship it was necessary to know how to prepare a stowage plan. We had a list of crates, cages, bundles … of the most diverse sizes … each package with its own peculiarities (not stackable, not loadable on deck, to be handled only with the forklift, to be anchored and fixed on board … perhaps to be welded to the floor of the hold!) and it was necessary to make precise calculations to stow everything correctly. We also had to take into account the weights, to properly balance the ship. And the beauty was that there were no (and for that matter, there aren’t even today!) schools that taught the shipping art. Of course, having done scientific studies could be of great help: knowing mathematics and geometry, calculating volumes, evaluating the incidence of weight per square meter … everything became very important and you could not go wrong. A wrong calculation meant that, at the time of boarding, that certain box did not enter the space provided and everything had to be done all over again! Then someone had a brilliant idea: if the packaging becomes all the same, loading a ship becomes child’s play and this is how the container was born. However, there are goods that CANNOT travel in containers: we are talking about packages that have “exceptional” measures or weights, far beyond the load capacity of a container. So, for the expedition, we have to go back to referring to the shipping artists!

FORTUNE INTERNATIONAL TRANSPORT of Milan is one of those companies that manage plants and this is just the latest in a long series: it is about ten packages that have exaggerated measurements (the diameter alone is on average more than seven meters! of them are over five meters high) so much so that, once they arrive in Italy (they will disembark in Chioggia), they reach Mantua and then make a final stretch by road (moving on special trucks equipped having got suitable road permits and duly escorted), traveling at night, dismantling traffic lights, removing all kinds of obstacles.

Here we see the moment of boarding: the ship was entirely chartered by FORTUNE and the loading plan studied in the Milan office, just as it once was.