Concluding that the French would be their most likely adversaries, they emphasized speed and long-range gunnery, and set about modernizing their older World War I dreadnoughts, building the Littorio-class battleships and a wide variety of destroyers,, submarines and cruisers, including the Zara-class: the best-protected heavy cruisers ever built until they were surpassed almost 20 years later by the U.S. The navies of Austria-Hungary and Italy eventually spent most of World War I keeping each other at bay in their respective harbors, with the notable exceptions of the latter's MAS motorboats ( mezzi d'assalto, or torpedo armed motorboats) and the first working prototypes of miniature single-torpedo armed submarines - dubbed "human torpedoes" - employed to sink two Austro-Hungarian battleships late in the War.ĭuring the interwar period, the Regia Marina was once again pressured by the changing global political situation to choose a proper design doctrine for their warships. Unfortunately, they were hampered from the very beginning by a serious lack of cohesion and uniformity in their officers and equipment, pitiful naval budgets resulting in poor infrastructure and facilities with which to support the navy, and rapidly advancing technologies that the divided naval schools of Italy couldn’t keep up with. Situated in the very center of the Mediterranean, the newly established Regia Marina attempted to claim the Mediterranean Sea as Mare Nostrum (literally "Our Sea"), constantly vying for supremacy against France, The United Kingdom, and Austria-Hungary, keeping the Regia Marina at the forefront of Italian politics. Out of this unification was born the Italian Royal Navy, known as the Regia Marina. With the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Italian peninsula would not be united for over a thousand years until the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
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