![]() The Italian battleship Roma was considered to be a beautiful ship in keeping with Italian naval design. Roma was built to withstand incoming shells, and its compartmented hull, with its ingenious system of bulkheads and expansion cylinders, was made to withstand enemy torpedoes. But the Roma was not just pleasing to the eye, she was also well-armored, fast moving, and very capably armed with three main gun turrets, two forward and one aft, each mounting three 15-inch guns that could fire a high-velocity, armor-piercing shell more than 25 miles. ![]() She was trim, and graceful, unlike, say, British warships, which tended to be blocky, purposeful, and businesslike. Roma was a beautiful ship, but then, building beautiful warships was something the Italians were known for. But instead, it was limited to a single, brief appearance as a sort of sacrificial lamb, slaughtered at the altar of a horrible new kind of weapon. Roma was a beautiful, capable warship, and perhaps in other circumstances her role in history might have been a gallant or even decisive one. But what they were really doing that night was switching sides and joining the Allies. Carlo Bergamini told a local German commander. Leading them was the Roma, the Italian Navy’s newest and largest battleship, and they were going out to attack a large Allied naval force, which was, at that moment, staging an amphibious invasion further down the coast at Salerno. 9, 1943, a large force of Italian warships – three battleships, three cruisers, and eight destroyers – slipped out of the northern Italian port of La Spezia. ![]() A couple of hours after midnight on the morning of Sept.
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