Sinking of the battleship Leonardo da Vinci

Late on the evening of 2 August 1916 the dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci lay at her moorings in the Mar Piccolo, the inner basin of the naval port of Taranto. That day she had been taking on ammunition. Shortly before 11 p.m. sailors in the after part of the ship felt a slight trembling of the hull, and smoke poured out of one of the ventilation ducts, near the ammunition hoist for the 120 mm guns. The ship’s commanding officer, Captain Galeazzo Sommi Picenardi, ordered every fire-fighting measure to be taken, including the flooding of the after magazines. The fire could not be brought under control, however. According to Italian accounts, at about 11.20–11.30 p.m. the ammunition stores blew up, and the explosion tore open the hull. A quarter of an hour before midnight the ship capsized and settled upside down on the bottom of the basin, in about 11 metres of water.

The fleet’s newest ship

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the three Conte di Cavour-class dreadnoughts, the newest and most powerful ships of the Italian navy. She was built by the Odero yard at Sestri Ponente near Genoa. She was launched in October 1911 and entered service in May 1914, a few weeks before war broke out in Europe. She carried thirteen 305 mm guns. She never saw action. The chief of staff of the Italian navy, Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, believed that in the narrow, shallow Adriatic Austro-Hungarian submarines and mines were too dangerous for large ships, and kept the battleships in safe bases, ready to fight only if the whole Austro-Hungarian fleet put to sea. Taranto was the chief of these bases.

The victims

According to Italian navy figures, 21 officers and 227 petty officers and ratings, 248 men in all, were killed in the explosion and in the attempts to save the ship. Some sources give 249 dead. Among them was Captain Sommi Picenardi. The blast threw him into the water with severe burns, and he died in hospital two days later. He was posthumously awarded the gold medal for naval valour. It was the second disaster to an Italian capital ship in her own port in less than a year. In September 1915 the old battleship Benedetto Brin had blown up in similar circumstances at Brindisi.

Sabotage or accident?

The commission of inquiry concluded that it had been sabotage, and in Italy no one doubted that Austro-Hungarian intelligence was behind the fire. Several people were arrested, and the investigation into attacks on Italian ships and factories led Italian naval counter-intelligence to the headquarters of a sabotage network in the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Zurich. In February 1917 its agents broke into the safe of the naval officer who ran the network, Rudolf Mayer, and carried off documents that enabled the network to be broken up. Austrian involvement in the destruction of Leonardo da Vinci was never proved, however. According to some researchers the suspects in this case were innocent. Official Italian navy documents now speak of an internal explosion following a fire, and many historians point to the spontaneous combustion of unstable new propellants or of badly secured inflammable materials on board as a possible cause. Similar explosions destroyed ships of other navies in those years too.

Salvage

The Italians did not want to break up the wreck where it lay. For more than two years divers removed coal, ammunition and guns from the upturned hull, sealed it and cut away the funnels. On 5 August 1919 one of them found the chest containing the ship’s battle ensign. It is kept today in Rome, in the hall of flags of the Victor Emmanuel II Monument. In September 1919 the hull was raised with compressed air and, still upside down, brought into a dry dock, and in January 1921 it was turned the right way up. There was, however, no money for repair and modernisation. In 1923 Leonardo da Vinci was struck from the navy list and sold for scrap.