The Royal Navy's most famous ship now speaks a little Italian. At the historic Portsmouth dockyard in England, where the monumental restoration of HMS Victory—the ship from which Admiral Horatio Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805—has been under way for several years, the head of timber carpentry is an Italian: Leonardo Bortolami, 42, originally from Padua. Every day, he manages approximately twenty specialists, including master shipwrights, carpenters, and laminators, who are working on a behemoth weighing over 3,500 tons, measuring 70 meters long and 16 meters broad. Bortolami personifies the image of the "modern" master shipwright. He is a graduate of architecture who specialized in naval and nautical design and earned a PhD in the restoration of historic vessels. He combined his academic training with the qualification of a master shipwright, an ancient profession that involves the construction and repair of wooden ships piece by piece. With a rare combination of theoretical understanding and expertise, he was the right candidate to manage one of the most intricate naval conservation projects ever performed. The project, known as "The Big Repair", began in 2022 and is expected to cost 45 million pounds over the next 12 years. Bortolami notes that the goal is to ensure the iconic ship, which was launched in 1765, is preserved for another fifty years. All of this without locking its doors: the Victory, a museum ship among the world's most valuable pieces of maritime history, is open to visitors and receives roughly 300,000 visitors each year.