SOCIAL HISTORY and LINER HISTORY – THE ITALIAN LINE

ITALIAN LINE HISTORY

The Italian Line or Italia Line, also known as the Italia di Navigazione S.p.A., was a passenger shipping line that operated regular transatlantic service between Italy and the United States, as well as Italy and South America. During the late years ’60, the company was also heavily involved in cruising. It later, from 1981, concentrated her activity in worldwide freight and containers traffic service.

The Italia Genova was started on January 1, 1937, coming from Italia Flotte Riunite (United Fleets Italy), when the Italian government encouraged the merger of Genoa-based Navigazione Generale Italiana (NGI), Turin-based Lloyd Sabaudo, and Trieste-based Cosulich STN, which was previously an Austro-Hungaric company.  SS Giulio Cesare, built in 1923, in Italian Line service 1932-1937

The new company acquired the Cosulich-owned MS Saturnia and MS Vulcania, the Lloyd Sabaudo-owned SS Conte Rosso, SS Conte Biancamano and SS Conte Grande and the NGI-owned SS Giulio Cesare, SS Duilio, SS Roma and MS Augustus. The same year two previously commissioned ocean liners were delivered to the company: SS Rex, who captured the Blue Riband in 1933, and SS Conte di Savoia.

During World War II, the company lost many of its ships, including the Rex and the Conte di Savoia. Other vessels were captured by the United States and converted into troopships; four of them survived the war: Conte Biancamano, Conte Grande, Saturnia, and Vulcania.

Commercial service was resumed only in 1947, under the company’s new name Società di navigazione Italia. In addition to the four vessels returned by United States, two new vessels, SS Andrea Doria and SS Cristoforo Colombo were commissioned in 1953 and 1954, respectively, to show the world that the country had recovered from the war and to re-establish the nation’s pride. However, in 1956, only three years after she was commissioned, the Andrea Doria was involved in a collision and sank. The company was swift to order a replacement for its sunken flagship, and the new SS Leonardo da Vinci was delivered in 1960. The ship was based on the same design as Andrea Doria, but was larger and featured many technical innovations.

In the late 1950s, the arrival of the jet aircraft had not yet had a notable effect on passenger numbers in the United States – Mediterranean traffic, and the Italian Line decided to order another pair of new ships for the trade. Plans for these were already being made in 1958, but the construction took longer than expected and the ships were not completed until 1965, as SS Michelangelo and SS Raffaello. Unfortunately the ships were built too late to be truly profitable on the North Atlantic route. Although planned from the start for alternative cruising, the ships had several design features that made their use as cruise ships very difficult.

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