Italy - Aligning a special seven-night cruise with the finale of the 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 1k out of Sanremo’s harbour for the Saturday night music extravaganza.
This super-sized piece of light art involved 60 x Robe iBolts, 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.
“We had initially wanted to do this monumental style of lightshow for the 2024 event,” Iavarone 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 337m long and 72m 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.
The iBolt installation was the brainchild of a collab between lighting designers Amedeo Orfei and Davide Trentacoste of Fix Advanced Entertainment Solution, Roberto Iavarone, 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. 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 Iavarone. The 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,” 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.
