Nela

A Benetti of forty-two metres carrying ten guests and nine crew. The yard's name tells you what to expect of the build; the two numbers tell you what to expect of the week, and the second pair matters more than the first.

Five cabins, and the point about them is that they are evenly sized. There is no compromise berth at the end of a corridor, no room that is obviously smaller so the brochure could claim ten, and therefore no conversation on arrival about who is going to take it.

That sounds minor and it is not. On most yachts of this length the fifth cabin is the one nobody wants, and a week begins with a group deciding, politely, which couple is going to accept less. Here the question does not arise.

Nine crew for ten guests is close to one each. At forty-two metres it is a generous complement rather than a bare one, and it is what allows the deck, the galley, the interior and the tenders to be running at the same time instead of one after another.

The swim platform is wide. It is the part of a yacht that gets used most and specified least, and its width decides whether swimming is something that has to be organised or something that simply happens each time the yacht stops for the afternoon.

Benetti build in Viareggio and Livorno and have done for longer than almost anyone. What that buys is not styling but predictability: hulls that behave the way the specification says they will, and systems put together the way the yard has been putting them together for decades.

She is available across the Mediterranean rather than tied to a single coast. For a ten-guest yacht that is worth having: the itineraries that suit her are the ones that move between countries, and forty-two metres is a comfortable size for exactly that.

Take her if you want ten people looked after properly with nothing about the arrangement to argue over. She is not the fastest yacht here, nor the newest, and she is one of the few where every cabin is a good one.