The Final Glory Of The Italian Line
The Italian Line was responsible for constructing two of the last purpose-built ocean liners. SS Michelangelo and SS Raffaello were built with the contemporary style of the Nineteen Sixties to sail between the Mediterranean and New York. But the era also saw the emergence of jet air travel, against which no liner could contend. That these two sister ships even had the brief careers that they did was due to national pride and an ample subsidy by the Italian government.
They are worth considering due to their beauty and style. They were the swan song actors in the age of steam-powered ocean liners; their hulls appropriately decorated white. They had very eye-catching profiles, streamlined and sharp. They had an unusual arrangement of two funnels, aft of center and like the elaborate cooling towers of some sort of science fiction atomic power plants. This feature was advanced for the time and has been worked into the design of the funnels on today's ships.
History Of The Italian Line
SS Rex and SS Conte di Savoia dictated by Il Duce were expected to make Italy competitive on the sea, in line with his many grandiose aspirations. Rex, intended as the faster of the two, won the Blue Riband in 1932 but quickly lost it to the super-ship of the age, The French Line's SS Normandie. Conte di Savoia was styled as the more luxurious of the two.
The first ships commissioned with a post war subsidy: the Andrea Doria first sailed the Atlantic in the winter of 1953. Her sister Cristoforo Colombo launched a year later. The two were nearly identical at over 29,000 tons. The Andrea Doria has the most lingering fame of all the Italian liners, notoriously sinking after being struck by the Swedish American Line's MS Stockholm in fog, July 25, 1956. She lies off the coastline of Nantucket, having attracted audacious divers for years, collapsing slowly into the seabed because of corrosion and snagged fishing nets.
The replacement for Andrea Doria was the 33,000 ton SS Leonardo Da Vinci, featuring lifeboat mounts that allowed them to be lowered with up to 25 degrees of list. A lesson learned from the slowly capsizing Andrea Doria. Leonardo Da Vinci spanned the technology gap between the older ships and Michelangelo and Raffaello.
In 1958 the Italian Line began to plan for a pair of super-ships. They would have a three class layout especially for frequently scheduled transit between Genoa and New York. The capacity, including the crew, was 2500 souls. They were constructed almost simultaneously by two separate shipyards. Both were 900 feet in length and 45,000 tons, with thirty lounges and a theater with almost 500 seats each, 760 cabins and 18 elevators.
The funnel design became a trademark. Some thought they were awful but they were effective in scattering smoke and engine fumes. The grill construction allowed airflow to pass through, a feature that has become a norm on modern cruise liners.
Michelangelo: Storm Rider
Manufactured at Genoa Sestri shipyards, from start to finish she took five years to finish and entered service from Genoa in April 1965. In the spring of 1966, during a stormy crossing to New York, a rogue wave hit her headlong, caving in the front of the upper structure beneath the bridge. Two passengers were lost, swept out to sea and a crew member perished later from injuries. As a result of the incident the aluminum plating that had crumpled was switched out with steel, not just on Michelangelo but also on her sister ship and many of the other rival liners including the SS United States.
She continued in service without another incident but passenger numbers declined together with all of the other liners. There was just no taking on jet airliners, particularly after the introduction of the 747. There was a lackluster attempt to operate cruises but many of her features worked against her. Her cabins were small and did not have windows and the three class layout.
Michelangelo was finally withdrawn from service in 1975 and sold to the Shah of Iran whose shipping schemes were thwarted by the Iranian revolution. She spent fifteen years at Bandar Abbas and was finally broken up in Pakistan in 1995.
Raffaello: Futuristic Style, Dated Transport Mode
At twenty-two tons larger than her sister and a little longer by, Raffaello was built by Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico in Trieste. She had a relatively uneventful life compared to Michelangelo, with minor engine problems that caused delays on a few trips.
Raffaello had a unique and modernistic decor that was a vision of the future that would likely not be out-of-place in a modern boutique hotel. She exhibited the finest that Italian design had to offer in the nineteen sixties. Lines were minimalist, evocative of art deco style of many of the great liners. A chic but sleek and antiseptic "space age" look, with polished metal, cool blues and hardwood paneling. To travel on this ship would have been a marvelous experience that is lost to the rushed modern traveler.
Sadly, she shared the same fate of being sold to Iran in 1975 and was sunk by a torpedo, just offshore of Bushehr in the Persian gulf in 1983.
Remembering An Age Gone By
Michelangelo is long gone and the wreck of Raffaello still rests just below the surface where she sank. Like most other ships of the mid twentieth century they made statements of romance, taste, national pride and subsidies, yet they were rapidly displaced by the more financially efficient airliners. There are few organizations that could oversee such beautiful ships as museums. That is the only enduring way to save the remaining few ocean liners: they must be curated as hotels to conserve the history of the era, whether by grant (unlikely to provide more than just partial funding) or by paying their ways as fixed hotels.
The super-liners, from the Cunard Queens and SS Normandie to SS United States and The Sisters of the Italian Line had interior spaces in the hundreds of thousands of square feet, the size of a large skyscraper. Not many locations have a need for such things on their waterfronts. Operation as cruise liner conversions has had limited success but can not be very competitive in cost or service with the huge modern cruise ships.
So, all of these ships are a story, a romantic story from a past age now. Easily lost because such ships are no longer used as a dedicated mode of passenger travel. It is because they were once a significant transportation mode, highly valued and central to the pride of their nations that all these liners of the ocean, and specifically these two beautiful Italian Sisters, should remembered.
