Italian Torpedo Cruisers History

Study Notes

The Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) built a series of torpedo cruisers between the 1870s and 1890s as part of a program to strengthen the fleet during a period of limited naval budgets.
The first vessel, Pietro Micca, was laid down in 1875 and proved to be a disappointment in service.
The four Goito-class cruisers and the eight-vessel Partenope class were based on the experimental design, Tripoli.
The Folgore class was ordered in the late 1890s but was too slow for its intended role.
Most of the torpedo cruisers served during the relatively uneventful 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, and as a result, saw little activity outside of routine training operations.
By the early 1900s, many of the cruisers had been reduced to subsidiary roles or had been discarded outright.
A handful of vessels, specifically of the Partenope and Agordat classes, were still in front-line service by the time of the Italo-Turkish War in 1911–1912.
The surviving vessels still in service during World War I saw no offensive operations, though four—Tripoli, Goito, Partenope, and Minerva—that had been converted into minelayers, were employed to help blockade the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Sea.
Partenope was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in March 1918, the only Italian torpedo cruiser to be lost to hostile action.
Long since obsolete by the early 1920s, the remaining torpedo cruisers were then sold for scrap. Their place in the fleet's reconnaissance force was taken by a group of German and Austro-Hungarian light cruisers that were acquired as war reparations.