Without Gianfranco Vitali, the story of the Italian Malindi that we like to tell, would be very different and the tourist one might not even exist.  
Almost certainly it would not have the same connotations of greatness, notoriety and business, of tourist splendour and respect for the environment, of help and coexistence with the local population.
Above all, it would not have more than half a century of anecdotes, characters, residential paradises and the beauty of a true Italian novel in Africa.
Today Vitali celebrates 80 years, but the 52 who tie him to Kenya are the most important and heartfelt. They are those who transpire from his living eyes and still make his voice tremble with emotion.
"I arrived in Kenya for the first time in 1968 - the entrepreneur from Bergamo told Malindikenya.net - and I immediately fell in love with it. I have always been a traveler and I have traveled almost all over the world. But Kenya at the time was a magical garden and the idea of discovering it to so many fellow countrymen fascinated me".
Guest of another legendary character who gave the there to the proliferation of Italians in Malindi, the eccentric Leghorn Luciano Meschi, Vitali who at the time was a promising footballer (former junior Inter, later would have been for years in the leadership of Atalanta) and right-hand man of the Roman tycoon Renzo Zingone, began to build villas in the Palm Tree area, in partnership with the Brescian Renato Marini.
"Zingone decided to arrive in Malindi with an off-road vehicle, starting from Italy - says Vitali - I landed with the plane in Mombasa and since then I have always gone forward and backward. At the beginning of the seventies I had the idea to develop tourism on the sea, in the then virgin area of Silversand and Casuarina. Always involving partners and friends with passion and entrepreneurial spirit".
Gianfranco Vitali has always believed in Malindi and saw its tourist explosion at the beginning of the eighties. His first hotel in the town, the Coconut Village, followed by the White Elephant Lodge, conceived together with Armando Tanzini. Thanks to an agreement with the tour operator "Viaggi del Ventaglio" (five years of "empty for full") and later with Turisanda for the White Elephant, Vitali transformed Malindi into one of the most popular long-haul destinations for Italians and other operators, including Franco Rosso (who bought the Tropical built by Vitali himself), Grandi Viaggi and Diplomat Tour that opened the Jambo Village where today stands the Billionaire, they decided to bet on Kenya also for the sea, as well as for safaris as it had always been until then.
The enthusiast and visionary from Bergamo, however, looks ahead: it's time to focus on the so-called "residential tourism".
"I started thinking about creating villas with beautiful gardens and swimming pool in the splendor of Casuarina - says Vitali - and I had an excellent collaborator in the young Marco Vancini, we were the first to guarantee an income to those who bought the house in Malindi, introducing the idea of timeshare.
It is the early nineties, from then on Malindi has its consecration: more than ten thousand Italians have work or interests there, from seventy to one hundred thousand a year visit it for tourism.
There would be many and many other stories to tell and in the book on Italian Malindi that one day we will publish, Gianfranco Vitali will certainly occupy one of the privileged places, especially because he is part of that school of clear and serene countrymen who have shown the best of the Italian spirit and who have no skeletons either in the closets or under the pile pile bed.
In 1995 the meeting with the charming lawyer Rita Duzioni, who will become his second wife and, in spite of the many commitments in Italy, the constant of never letting too many months pass between a vacation in Malindi and another
The construction of the "villa of dreams" in the Marine Park, on the land that was once the conservationist George Adamson and his wife Joy, the writer of "Nata Libera", was the classic icing on a cake on which 80 candles are now extinguished, 52 of which have the colors of the Kenyan flag.