List of battleships of Italy

Starting in the 1890s, the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) began building a series of modern battleships. Early designs were marked by their small size, light armor, and high speed compared to contemporary foreign counterparts. The first pre-dreadnought battleship design, the Ammiraglio di Saint Bon class, was constrained by budgetary limits imposed by the legislature. Two ships were ordered by the class's namesake, Admiral Simone de Pacoret Saint Bon, though the design was also influenced by Benedetto Brin, who replaced di Saint Bon as naval minister after his death. Brin designed the next pair of battleships, the Regina Margherita class. These ships were larger than the preceding class, and were intended to challenge the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg-class battleships then under construction. Brin himself died during the construction process. Vittorio Cuniberti designed the next class of small pre-dreadnoughts, the Regina Elena class, which were the fastest battleships in the world at the time of their completion.^[1][2] These ships all served in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912, where they were primarily used to provide naval gunfire support for the Italian ground troops, as the Ottoman Navy largely confined itself to port.^[3]

By the time that the Regina Elenas had been built in the early 1900s, the British battleship HMS Dreadnought had been completed, a revolutionary design that rendered all previous battleships obsolete. Therefore, a new dreadnought-type battleship was needed. The new ship was Dante Alighieri, and was designed by Rear Admiral Edoardo Masdea.^[4] The Italian Navy built five further battleships to two similar designs: the Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria classes. These six dreadnoughts formed the core of the Italian fleet during World War I, as a further four-ship class was cancelled.^[5] Both the Italian and Austro-Hungarian navies adopted cautious fleet policies and neither chose to risk their capital ships in a major engagement; as a result, the Italian battle line spent the war in harbor and did not see combat.^[6] Nevertheless, the dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci was destroyed by a magazine explosion in August 1916.^[7] The pre-dreadnought Benedetto Brin was also destroyed by an internal explosion in September 1915, and her sister Regina Margherita was sunk by a German mine in December 1916.^[8] The remaining battleships of the Ammiraglio di Saint Bon and Regina Elena classes were discarded after the end of the war.^[1]

In the interwar period, the Italian Navy—along with the rest of the major naval powers—was limited by the Washington Naval Treaty, which granted Italy parity with the French Navy.^[9] The Italians had 70,000 long tons (71,000 t) worth of battleship tonnage available for new vessels before they would reach their treaty limits, but they avoided new construction in the 1920s due to severe budgetary problems and to avoid a naval arms race with France.^[10][11] These financial limitations also forced the Italians to scrap Dante Alighieri in 1928.^[12][13] Nevertheless, the Regia Marina decided to make use of its excess tonnage by the early 1930s, which resulted in the four Littorio-class battleships. Two were finished early in World War II and were used extensively to escort convoys during the North African Campaign. The third ship, Roma, was finished in 1942, but was sunk in September 1943 by a German radio-controlled bomb when Italy surrendered to the Allies. The fourth ship, Impero, was never finished and was instead sunk by American bombers and scrapped after the end of the war. The two surviving ships, Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, were surrendered to the Allies and were later broken up for scrap.^[14] Of the surviving members of the Conte di Cavour class, Conte di Cavour was scrapped after the end of the war and Giulio Cesare was surrendered to the Soviet Union as war reparations. Only the two Andrea Doria-class battleships survived in Italian service for any significant length of time after the conclusion of hostilities; both served as training ships until the mid-1950s, when they too were broken up for scrap.^[5]