Comacchio Brand Guidelines: The Treviso Brothers’ Drilling Rigs, From a Farm Workshop

Three brothers and a workshop beside the family farm.

Comacchio began in 1986 at Castello di Godego, a town in the province of Treviso in the Veneto. The company says it was founded by three Comacchio brothers; a sponsored feature published in Il Sole 24 Ore’s Nordest pages on 29 May 2026, which the company reproduces on its own website, names them as Renzo, Pasqualino and Patrizio Comacchio, and says they had worked as employees in the metalworking trade before setting up on their own.

The start was modest. According to that sponsored feature, the business worked from rooms next to the family’s farm, first making mechanical parts for other companies and then servicing other makers’ drilling rigs on site, which convinced the brothers they could build a machine of their own. The company’s timeline dates the first Comacchio-branded rig to 1989; the sponsored feature adds that the early machines were given names rather than serial numbers.

Growth meant moving. In 1992 production went to a shed in Castello di Godego’s industrial zone, and the first export, to Sweden, followed in 1997, the company says. In 2003 it moved to a new building at Riese Pio X, in the same province, which remains its headquarters. According to the company’s timeline, the Riese site was enlarged in 2008, a second plant opened at Castello di Godego in 2016 and was doubled in size in 2023, and the offices at Riese were renovated in 2024. The company marked its 40th anniversary in May 2026.

MC, GEO, CA and CH.

Comacchio makes hydraulic drilling rigs rather than pile-driving hammers. Its website groups them by job: large-diameter piles, micropiles and anchors, site investigation, geothermal drilling and water wells, with a separate mineral-exploration arm. The sponsored Sole 24 Ore feature puts the range at machines from about 2 to 90 tonnes.

The model names follow those families. The MC series covers micropile and anchoring rigs, in articulated, vertical, long-reach and separate-power-pack versions, alongside MC-E masts for mounting on excavators and MC TX rigs for tunnels. The GEO series, with truck-mounted GEO-T models, serves site investigation and geothermal work; the CA series, with truck-mounted CA-T models, is for water wells. The CH rigs, with the CHF models for continuous flight auger piling, form the large-diameter line.

That line is relatively recent. The company dates its entry into large-diameter drilling to 2015, with the first CH 450. Its earlier milestones were in movement and control: the company’s timeline credits the late 1990s with the MC 1200 and the use of radio technology on drilling rigs, while the sponsored Sole 24 Ore feature dates articulated rigs, with a patented mast articulation, to 1998 and radio control for foundation rigs to 1999.

Comacchio now runs its mining exploration work under its own name, Comacchio X, with a separate website that presents a Comacchio X series of exploration rigs and describes features such as automated rod handling. Another recent machine is the MC 15 TX, a tunnelling rig that the company says was designed for consolidation and pre-support work underground, drilling horizontally and nearly horizontally for forepoling, radial bolting, nailing and jet grouting, while still handling ordinary micropiles and anchors. Comacchio says it has a double slewing-ring mechanism, a modular mast, a rotary head from its own OMNI series and, as an option, a “Dual Motor” system that lets the diesel version also work with a separate electric motor; radio control comes as standard.

Piling rigs and documentation.

Piling and foundation rig makers sell machines that do most of their work out of sight, below ground, so their pictures tend to show what stands above it. The common image is a tall mast rising over a building site, often framed against a city skyline or a half-finished bridge, with the rig itself on crawler tracks in mud, gravel or sand. The height of the mast gives the photograph its shape, and the model code painted on it is often the largest lettering in the frame.

A second set of images is about tools. Augers, drilling buckets, casings, grabs and cutter wheels are laid out in rows or shown close up, clean and freshly painted, so that the parts that will disappear into the ground can be seen at all. Vibratory hammers, clamps and power packs are photographed the same way, as objects on their own, before they are lifted by a crane.

Trade fairs matter in this category. The bauma show in Munich is where makers stage large stands, with rigs raised to full height under the hall roof or on the open-air grounds, and where new models, electric versions and anniversaries are announced. Stand design, banners and the colour of the machines themselves are part of how a maker is recognised there.

Many of these companies also carry a family or founder’s name, or grew out of a contractor’s own workshop, and their histories are told through dates, places and model numbers rather than slogans. For this series we look at how each maker presents that history, using an unofficial palette and a stand-in typeface, and reproducing no machine, logo or nameplate.

A family name, and an X.

According to the sponsored Sole 24 Ore feature, the brothers turned the business into a joint-stock company and brought managers from outside the family into senior roles while keeping ownership; the company’s timeline dates the change to an S.p.A. to 2022, alongside a rebranding and the start of a generational handover. The sponsored feature names Renzo Comacchio as chairman, with Pasqualino running sales and Patrizio production, and says the second generation already works in the business. A 2026 company announcement, published in Coring Magazine and reproduced on the company’s website, describes Comacchio S.p.A. as family-owned.

Italian business-register data published on Aziende.it, updated on 7 September 2026, lists Comacchio S.p.A. as an active joint-stock company with its registered office in Riese Pio X, entered in the Treviso chamber of commerce register in September 1987 and classed as a maker of mining, quarry and building-site machinery, with 276 employees in 2025.

The company presents its rigs as Italian-built. The sponsored feature says Comacchio has chosen to keep producing in its home area and in Italy, at its sites in Riese Pio X and Castello di Godego; the company’s timeline puts its production floor space at about 20,000 square metres after the 2023 expansion. Its website says each machine is designed around the needs of its customers, from large international groups to small family firms, and names its values as cohesion, innovation, reliability and excellence, sustainability and flexibility. Its website also links to an official online shop and a customer portal.

The company marks its milestones in its own news pages. At the Geofluid show in Piacenza in 2026, it says, it celebrated its 40th anniversary with dealers, customers and partners from around the world, and handed over the machine with serial number 6000, a new GEO 205 Generation 3, to its long-standing French dealer, Eurofor/Foraloc. In June 2026 it announced Glomak / Centrocar as its new partner in Portugal, Angola and Mozambique, with a memorandum signed at the Italian consulate in Porto by, among others, Renzo Comacchio as chairman of Comacchio S.p.A.

For a design guide, Comacchio shows how a family engineering firm can carry one surname across many rig families and then add a sub-brand marked by a single letter. Compare Casagrande, another drilling-rig maker in north-east Italy, and Fraste, a drilling-rig maker elsewhere in the Veneto. For this guide we use a slate grey, a concrete white and an orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Comacchio’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.