I have not been able to find a photograph of the Italian pre-dreadnought battleship R.N. Napoli (completed 1908).

It is a Regina Elena class ship. The full class is:
R.N. Regina Elena
R.N. Vittorio Emanuele
R.N. Napoli
R.N. Roma

I have pictures for all the others. If anyone is able to find a picture of the Napoli please post it here or let me know. It would be a great help.

MB. you are the battleship-meister!

Cheers!

Napoli and her sisters were some mean looking ships. Pretty radical for their time.

I agree- Italian Naval design has a long history of innovation with regards to iron and steel ships however.

What kind of innovations? And what happened to the Italian fleet by WWII? Or was that more a case of command and a far bigger opponent?

First and foremost the Napoli was a very fast ship. The first of the class to be finished was complted in 1907, the year before the British completed the world's first battle-cruiser. That makes the Napoli a sort of pre-dreadnought battle-cruiser.

Also the arcs of fire are excellent. Two turrets for main armament was pretty standard pre-dreadnought practice, but to also place the secondary armament in turrets was advanced. Those secondary turrets also being arranged very well, to give 8-gun end on fire, as well as the standard 6-gun broadside that casements would give. Casemented secondary armament would only give 2 or 4-gun end on fire depending on the layout. The centre turrets have clear 180 degree arcs, which is excellent.

The trade off is that the main turrets only had one gun each, rather than two. But then, no ship is perfect.



Italy started WWII with an excellent fleet of modernised WWI battleships and new battleships. What happened to it was Taranto. Nobody had ever launched an attack like it before (it probably helped inspire the Japanese to Pearl Harbour) and the Italians were not expecting it. Overnight they lost their advantage in the Mediterranean to the British.

The importance of those few torpedo-bombers that launched the Taranto attack should not be underestimated. Had the Italian fleet been able to effectively block the British convoy routes it would have been a disaster for the British in North Africa, and the hypothetically the possible loss of the Middle East, which would have been a disaster for all the Allies.

Wouldn't Taranto suggest that the Royal Navy had in a way overtaken the Italians in inovation by virtue of its use of aircraft carriers? I mean, the withdrawal of the fleet after Taranto was because the Italians believed that the British could repeat the exercise, while they didn't have their own rabbit to pull out of a hat.

Consider the Caio Duilio.



The real importance of this armor arrangement is that it only armours parts of the ship.

Consider the HMS Dreadnought coastal battleship, built a year before the Dulio. The entire ship is armoured, which makes the ship exceedingly heavy, slow, and inefficient. Basically no ship before the Duilio was armoured in this selective manner.

The British response was basically the same ship, if this is any indication of how revolutionary the Caio Duilio was in terms of naval design.




That would be a sick History Forum custom title.

The Italian decision not to build any aircraft carriers was not due to lack of innovation, it was a choice, because they did not think they would need them. Why spend resources building aircraft carriers instead of battleships when Italy's geographic location lends itself well to giving air cover over the Mediterranean? The problem was that there was a total lack of good communication and co-operation between the Italian air force and navy. So much so that the Italian navy eventually stopped placing reconnaissance aircraft on their ships and replaced them with fighter planes (that had to fly to the mainland to land) because the navy had no confidence in land based fighter cover arriving when requested.



It would.

Aw yah.