Recreational scuba diving and Cressi are almost exactly the same age. Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan patented the Aqua-Lung in 1943. Cressi was formally established in Genoa in 1946. The two histories have been tangled ever since, with Cressi contributing gear, ideas, and innovations to nearly every decade of scuba’s development. This is that story, told through the products that made a difference.
Before Cressi: Two Brothers and a Workshop in Genoa (Late 1930s)
The story starts before Cressi was officially a company. In the late 1930s, Egidio and Giovanni Battista "Nanni" Cressi were making masks and spearguns in a room of their Genoa home. Egidio left banking to build a life around the sea, and the brothers' early workshop produced rudimentary masks made from recycled inner tubes and a speargun they called the Saetta. These were not polished commercial products. They were solutions to problems two men had found in the water and decided to fix themselves.
That practical instinct, of seeing a problem, designing a fix, and testing it in the sea, never left the company. It is still Cressi’s approach today, and it explains more about the brand than any mission statement could.
1944 to 1946: A Name and a Registration
The official Cressi timeline picks up with a craft registration in 1944, followed by the postwar name "Il Pescatore Subacqueo Cressi" (Cressi the Underwater Fisherman) in 1946. That is the year Cressi formally marks as its founding, and it’s the year scuba diving itself was beginning to take shape as a pursuit beyond military and professional use. The ocean was opening up for recreational exploration, and Cressi was already there with the gear.
1947: The ARO AR47 Rebreather
A year after the official founding, Cressi introduced the ARO AR47, an oxygen rebreather derived from military equipment but improved with a condensate and saliva collector to prevent the soda lime from getting damp. Rebreathers were serious technology for serious divers then, and they still are.
The ARO AR47 showed early on that Cressi was paying attention to where diving was actually going, not just where it already was. A company content to make masks and spearguns for recreational spearfishermen had no particular reason to develop rebreather technology. Cressi did it anyway.
1951: The Rondine Fin
If you want to understand how Cressi thinks about design, the Rondine fin is one of the clearest examples. Before it, most fins placed the foot pocket directly behind the blade, with the two elements essentially in the same plane. The kick drove water straight back, but the angle of propulsion was inefficient and the fins required significant physical effort.
Cressi changed that. The Rondine moved the foot pocket into an overlapping relationship with the blade, changing the kick angle and meaningfully reducing the effort required to move through the water. Less fatigue meant more efficiency, and these are the same priorities that still run through Cressi's product philosophy today.
It was a technical innovation, but it came from a simple observation: divers were working harder than they needed to.
1953: The Pinocchio Mask
The Pinocchio mask solved a problem that every diver who had ever experienced mask squeeze at depth would recognize immediately. By giving divers a practical way to pinch their nose and equalize, it removed one of the most common sources of discomfort and injury in early recreational diving. The Pinocchio is still recognizable today, and it is still in the Cressi catalog, a rare distinction for a product designed more than seventy years ago.
The fact that the Pinocchio is still sold makes it clear that it was not just a clever idea for its moment; it was the right answer to a real problem, and still is.
1965: The Polaris 4 Professional Regulator
By the mid-1960s, scuba diving was growing rapidly as a recreational sport, and the regulator had become its central piece of technology. The Polaris 4 Professional was Cressi's contribution to that moment: a regulator built around robustness and low maintenance, designed to hold up over time and perform predictably in a wide range of conditions.
The Polaris was not just a product. It was a statement about what Cressi thought a regulator should be: reliable, durable, and easy to service. Those values still hold today.
1970: The Equi-Vest
The Equi-vest is one of the most consequential products in Cressi's history, though it rarely gets the recognition it deserves. Introduced in 1970, it was the first jacket integrated with gas cylinders and fed directly from the first stage.
In other words, it contained the essential principles of the modern buoyancy compensator long before the BCD became standard equipment for recreational divers. Every jacket BCD in the water today carries some DNA from that 1970 design, whether the people wearing them know it or not.
2000: The Big Eyes Mask
Fifty-four years after the company was founded, Cressi introduced a mask that would become one of its most recognized and widely used products. The Big Eyes mask used inclined lenses to widen the diver's field of vision and improve the downward view toward their own equipment, a meaningful practical improvement that addresses something every diver deals with on every dive.
The Big Eyes was not a reinvention of the mask. It was a refinement of something that was already good, made better by attention to what divers actually need to see underwater. The Big Eyes line is still one of Cressi's best sellers, and the Evolution and Crystal versions remain among the most recommended masks for new and experienced divers alike.
2011: The Leonardo Dive Computer
The Leonardo was the first dive computer designed in-house by Cressi Elettronica, and it embodied the brand's design philosophy as clearly as any product in the catalog. A single button controlled the entire interface; the display used large digital figures for depth and time; audible alarms handled critical warnings; and the decompression model was developed by Cressi's own engineers. Nothing was added for its own sake.
The Leonardo became enormously popular with new divers precisely because it did not try to do everything. It did what divers needed, clearly and reliably, and that was enough. It is still one of the most recommended entry-level dive computers on the market more than a decade after its introduction.
What 80 Years Actually Means
A company timeline can make history feel like a series of accomplishments stacked neatly on top of each other, but the reality of 80 years in any industry is messier and more interesting than that. Some products did not work the way they should have, decisions were reconsidered, and technologies took longer than expected to get right. None of that is unique to Cressi.
What is notable is the consistency of the underlying approach. From the Saetta speargun built in a Genoese home in the late 1930s to the Raffaello dive computer earning a ScubaLab Best Buy in 2025, the same instincts keep showing up: find the real problem, design a genuine solution, test it in the sea, and make it last. Keep it simple, keep the family name on it, and mean what that implies.
Marco Cressi, who runs the company today alongside his brother Antonio as its third generation of family leadership, has described the philosophy in straightforward terms: less volume, less weight, less mass, less effort. Good gear should get out of the way and let the dive happen. It should not demand attention for the wrong reasons.
That idea is older than the company. It was already present in what Egidio and Nanni were doing in their Genoa workshop before anyone called it Cressi. Eight decades later, it is still the clearest way to describe what the brand is actually trying to do.
The next 80 years will bring different materials, different technologies, and dives in places that are difficult to imagine right now. The gear will change because it always does. The values behind it, if the family has anything to say about it, will not.
