Ships of Italy

The Italian Peninsula, after the fall of the Roman Empire, had not been united in over a thousand years until the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, leading to the birth of the Regia Marina – the Italian Royal Navy. Situated in the very centre of the Mediterranean, the new Regia Marina vied to proclaim Mare Nostrum – Our Sea; but the newly established navy was hampered from the very start. The Regia Marina suffered from inter-officer rivalries, serious lack of cohesion and uniformity, lack of resources, rapidly advancing technologies that the divided naval schools of Italy couldn’t keep up with, and finally lack of local shipyards and infrastructure. However, the constant vying for supremacy in the Mediterranean against their naval allies and rivals of France, England, and Austria-Hungary kept the Regia Marine at the forefront of Italian politics.

The turn of the 20th Century was when the Regia Marina truly began to rise as a global naval power. Their first dreadnought, Dante Alighieri, was the first battleship to have her main armament in triple-gun turrets and two new cheap-to-produce and deadly weapons, MAS motorboats (torpedo armed motorboats) and the first working prototypes of miniature single-torpedo armed submarines dubbed ‘human torpedoes’, both of which were employed to sink two Austro-Hungarian battleships in late World War I. Following World War I and the rise of Fascism in Italy, and with shifting global politics, the Regia Marina had to choose a proper design doctrine for their warships. They greatly emphasised speed, main gun range, and later protection. Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, Italy built a wide variety of destroyers, designed new, fast light cruisers capable of 35+ knots speed, rebuilt their older WWI dreadnoughts into more modern ships, built the Littorio class battleships, and built the best-protected heavy cruisers in the world until they were surpassed almost 20 years by the U.S. Des Moines class in 1948; the Zara class. They entered World War II with the fourth largest navy in the world, but suffered extremely heavy losses while struggling with the Royal Navy and Marine Nationale for dominance over the Mediterranean, especially to protect their African assets. Serious technological shortcomings, such as a near total disregard for RADAR and SONAR technology, consigned the Regia Marina to a “good weather fleet” – they relied on visual sighting of targets. Overcast days and night battles were incredibly dangerous, and these heavily mitigated the excellent gun range and fire control systems that Italian warships possessed. Despite this, the Regia Marina fought on against a numerically and technologically superior foe as a nation that wasn’t ready for war, doggedly holding onto the Mediterranean for three long years of war.