From 1954 to 1975, the Milan-based San Marco boatyard wrote some of the most interesting pages in the post-war history of powerboating. San Marco is the only yard that has extensively used Italian car engines for both its racing and production boats, including those of Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Fiat and Abarth. The yard produced such models as the 600 Del Mare, Giulietta del Mare, Appia; all fast and prestigious wooden runabouts with elegant lines and refined details. Like a fashion designer or a famous Italian coachbuilder, for over 20 years Oscar Scarpa, founder of the yard, promoted a tradition of excellence, building several hundred exclusive boats with his son Sandro each with unique specifications, either technical or aesthetic, and all beautifully finished. The San Marco boatyard has also enjoyed a successful racing career, with more than 30 world speed records and hundreds of victories to its credit at the highest competitive level - often with Oscar Scarpa in the driver's seat This book is both a tribute to the full history of the San Marco boatyard and its unique contribution to the world of speed boats. "Racing Cars of the Sea" is illustrated with a remarkable collection of hundreds of unpublished archival documents and photographs, as well as detailed information, including extensive production and racing records.

Popularly thought of as a recreational vehicle and one of the key ingredients of an ideal wilderness getaway, the canoe is also a political vessel. A potent symbol and practice of Indigenous cultures and traditions, the canoe has also been adopted to assert conservation ideals, feminist empowerment, citizenship practices, and multicultural goals. Documenting many of these various uses, this book asserts that the canoe is not merely a matter of leisure and pleasure; it is folded into many facets of our political life. Taking a critical stance on the canoe, The Politics of the Canoe expands and enlarges the stories that we tell about the canoe's relationship to, for example, colonialism, nationalism, environmentalism, and resource politics. To think about the canoe as a political vessel is to recognize how intertwined canoes are in the public life, governance, authority, social conditions, and ideologies of particular cultures, nations, and states. Almost everywhere we turn, and any way we look at it, the canoe both affects and is affected by complex political and cultural histories. Across Canada and the U.S., canoeing cultures have been born of activism and resistance as much as of adherence to the mythologies of wilderness and nation building. The essays in this volume show that canoes can enhance how we engage with and interpret not only our physical environments, but also our histories and present-day societies.