Costa Cruises rocks Sanremo with iBOLT show

Aligning a special seven-night cruise with the finale of the world-famous Sanremo Music Festival – which chooses Italy’s Eurovision pick each year – Costa Cruises and Carnival Maritime commissioned a massive lighting installation aboard its “Costa Toscana” ship which was moored approximately one km out of Sanremo’s harbour for the Saturday night music extravaganza.

This super-sized piece of light art involved 60 Robe iBOLTS. iBOLT is currently the Czech manufacturer’s most powerful high-impact laser-source searchlight-style fixture – and was overseen by Roberto Iavarone, entertainment superintendent for the Costa fleet, who co-ordinates all things related to entertainment and technical production aboard the various Costa line’s vessels.

“We had initially wanted to do this monumental style of lightshow for the 2024 event,” Roberto explained, “but it was not possible to amass the right equipment in the time available, so we did a show, but this year the goal was to go HUGE,” so the 337 m long and 72 m high vessel – currently the largest in the Costa fleet – was clearly visible from the shore!

In addition to the lightshow, a special entertainment programme was scheduled in the onboard Colosseo venue featuring special guests “Planet Funk” playing, with elements of their show streamed to the main Sanremo Festival ESC selection broadcast live to the Teatro Ariston venue in Sanremo.

Wanting to ensure they presented the most awesome onboard lightshow this year, the iBOLT installation was the brainchild of a collab between lighting designers Amedeo Orfei and Davide Trentacoste of Fix Advanced Entertainment Solution, Roberto, and Costa Cruises’ entertainment technical operations director, Paolo Campanelli.

iBOLTS were chosen by Paolo, Roberto and Amedeo as the brightest, best and most appropriate luminaires on the market to achieve the look they wanted.

The challenge was amassing enough iBOLTS! For this, RM Multimedia’s sales director Ermanno Tontini assisted in connecting them with several rental companies in Italy who owned iBOLTS.

The iBOLTS were all positioned along deck 18 of the Costa Toscana which is one of the upper decks, with the control and programming position below on Deck 9, plus some additional flood and wash lights rigged on Deck 8 and at the base of the ship’s funnel to up-light and illuminate the harbour side of the vessel. The installation was completed by integrator Videlio HMS.

“The results were truly amazing,” commented Roberto… the super-bright iBOLT beams blasted up into the night sky visible for many kilometres. “We certainly achieved our goal of being clearly seen from all along the shoreline, and the lightshow generated LOTS of SoMe chatter, photos and engagement, all of which had a great impact and buzz,” he concluded.

Some other Robe fixtures were also used in the Colosseo lighting rig for Planet Funk’s performance, rented in as requested by the TV crew, and Robe moving lights also feature in various different entertainment spaces onboard the Costa Toscana.

The ship is an Excellence-class vessel, built in 2021 and is currently the ninth largest cruise ship worldwide. It can accommodate 6,554 passengers and 1645 crew.

Photos by Roberto Iaverone/Pamela Dosini.