TS Raffaello

TS "Raffaello" was an Italian ocean liner built in 1965 for Italian Line by Cantieri Riuniti dell' Adriatico, Monfalcone. She was one of the last ships to be built primarily for liner service across the North Atlantic. Her sister ship was the TS "Michelangelo".

Design and Construction

Italian Line had begun planning new ships already in 1958. At the time they were planned to replace the ageing SS "Saturnia" and SS "Vulcania", but at the time, when competition from the jet aircraft had not yet had a huge impact in the Mediterranean area and jobs were needed for Italian sailors and shipyard workers, the construction of new superliners seemed like an attractive idea to Italian Line's executives. As a result, the new ships grew from the originally planned 35,000 tons to nearly 46,000 tons, the largest ships to be built in Italy since SS "Rex" and SS "Conte di Savoia" of the 1930s.

Unable to foresee the change that lay ahead for the shipping business, Italian Line planned the ships as true ocean liners, divided into three classes, with little thought given to cruising as an alternative use. Oddly even for a liner, all cabins below A-deck were windowless. On the technical side however the ships were amongst the most advanced of their time, featuring retractable stabiliser wings, highly modernised engineering panels and many other advantages, most notably the funnels which were especially designed to keep smoke and soot out of the rear decks. The funnel design proved to be highly effective, and it's a testament to their design that most funnels in modern passenger ships are built along similar principles.

The interiors of the new ships were in the Art Deco style so often associated with liners. The Raffaello's interiors were designed by architects such as Michele and Giancarlo Busiri Vici who had not worked on liner interiors before, as a result of which the Raffaello gained highly futuristic, more distinctive but admittedly more sterile interiors than her sister. Despite being planned as identical sisters, the Raffaello was 0.7 meters (2.29 feet) longer, 1.02 meters (3.34 feet) narrower and some 22 tons larger than her sister.

ervice

It took the shipyard five years to finish the Raffaello, a long time even by that days standards and the ship was additionally delayed when vibrations to her rear were discovered during the first sea trials and so it was decided to alter her propellers and transmission system to get rid of them. The modifications were successful and the ship was finally ready for service July 1965. Amongst the people present on her maiden voyage were the president of the Italian Senate and his wife Giuliana Merzagora who was also the godmother of the ship.

In 1966 the Raffaello hosted two unusual passengers for an ocean liner: she carried two Spider 1600 cars to be exhibited in the US. The cars were even driven on the first class lido decks of the ship which was a first for an ocean liner. 1969 saw Raffaello perform in a movie, the Italian film Amore mio aiutami, made in part to promote the two ships (despite the film officially being set on board the Raffaello, it was filmed on board both ships). In 1970 Raf (as she was nicknamed) did another "first" in the shipping business: her theatre stage was converted into a skating rink and skating shows were performed to the passengers. In 1970 the ship also suffered the most serious accident of her career when she collided with a Norwegian oil tanker off the south coast of Spain in May 1970. Fortunately no lives were lost.

Although Raffaello was the larger of the two sisters, and her interiors more distinctive, she was always the less important sister in the eyes of Italian Line's executives. As a result, when the Transatlantic traffic started declining due to competition air traffic, the Raffaello was sent cruising in order to make more money while the Michelangelo kept doing crossings. Unfortunately she was not very well suited for cruising. Although she did have a large amount of open deck space, she was too large, her cabins too small and most of them too spartan for demands of cruise passengers. It would have been possible to rebuild her as a genuine cruise ship, but the required funding the Italian Line required for the conversion was not available.

Epilogue

After spending the entire year 1974 cruising, Italian Line decided to withdraw the Raffaello in April 1975 when the Italian Government informed them they would not be subsidising the ships anymore (by 1975 they were paying 100 million lire per day, about $700 per passenger, to keep the ships sailing). Initially laid up in Genoa and later in La Spezia near the scrapyard, the Raffaello and her sister (which joined her in July of the same year), were inspected by several potential buyers such as Norwegian Cruise Line, Costa Amatori, Chandris Group and Home Lines. The latest even made a serious offer to buy the ships, despite large rebuilding costs, but the Italia Line turned down the offer.

Finally in 1976 the Shah of Persia emerged as a buyer the Italian Line could accept. The former flagships of Italy that has cost a total of $90 million in 1965, were sold for a mere $4 million a decade later. Raffaello made her final journey late in the same year from La Spezia into Bushehr, where she served as floating barracks for the next seven years.

In 1978 plans emerged to resurrect the Michelangelo and Raffaello as cruise ships. The Raffaello would have become "Ciro il Grande", a luxury cruiser accommodating 1300 passengers. However, specialists sent from Italy to evaluate the condition of the ships realise they were simply in a too poor condition to make reconstruction financially viable. As a result Raffaello stayed in her moorings. She was heavily damaged and looted during the Islamic revolution in 1979.

In 1983 plans were again made to bring the sisters back into service as cruise ships. Even if those could have been realised it was already too late for the Raffaello which was hit by a torpedo during the Iraq-Iran War in 1983 and partially sunk in shallow waters outside Bûshehr. Some time later her wreck was rammed by an Iranian cargo ship. Local divers further looted the hull during the following years.

Reportedly the Raffaello's hull still remains partially submerged where she sank today (2006), although there have been reports of plans to scrap her.

External links

* [http://www.greatoceanliners.net/raffaello.html/ Raffaello on the Great Ocean Liners]
* [http://www.michelangelo-raffaello.com/ Project Michelangelo]