Hasselblad × Riva

Announced October 12, 1963 at the second Salone Nautico in Genoa, the 500R was shown on the Riva stand rather than among the cameras, resting on the open sundeck of an Aquarama. Victor Hasselblad had photographed Rivas at Portofino the previous summer and wrote to Carlo Riva about the salt that had worked its way into his A12 magazine. Riva replied that his boats had the same problem and the same answer: seal everything, then varnish it.

Underneath it is a 500C, and Sason refused to move a single control. What changed was everything the hand touches. The leatherette gave way to mahogany strips with pale maple fillets, laid fore and aft like an Aquarama deck and finished with fourteen coats of marine varnish. Barilani replaced the finder's single lid with two mahogany leaves on chrome piano hinges that part down the middle, drawn from the twin hatches over the Aquarama's engines. A polished chrome strake, the boat's rubbing strip at one-fifteenth scale, runs round the body at waist height, the strap lugs became cleats, and the winding knob and focus grip were given the ivory rim profile of the Aquarama wheel.

It came in a varnished mahogany case with chrome hinges, lined in Riva's light blue vinyl, with enough trapped air to float with the camera inside. The yard tested this by pushing loaded cases off the slipway at Sarnico and timing how long the rowing boat took to collect them. The photographic press was polite and puzzled; Ferrania's house magazine called it a camera for people who already own the boat, which was accurate.

The service records keep one detail: the planks on each magazine were matched to its body, so that the centre maple fillet runs straight from one to the other, and a magazine from another 500R will not line up. Owners were told to re-varnish every second winter, and Riva did it free, alongside the boat.