Italian ironclad Palestro

Plan and profile drawing of Palestro

Palestro was 78.82 meters (258 ft 7 in) long between perpendiculars; she had a beam of 17.3 m (56 ft 9 in) and an average draft of 8 m (26 ft 3 in). She displaced 5,761 long tons (5,853 t) normally and up to 6,318 long tons (6,419 t) at full load. Her superstructure consisted of a small conning tower. She had a crew of 548 officers and men.[2]

Her propulsion system consisted of one single-expansion steam engine that drove a single screw propeller, with steam supplied by six coal-fired, cylindrical fire-tube boilers that were vented through a single funnel placed directly aft of the conning tower. Her engine produced a top speed of 12.85 knots (23.80 km/h; 14.79 mph) at 6,117 indicated horsepower (4,561 kW). She could steam for 1,780 nautical miles (3,300 km; 2,050 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). The ship was barque-rigged to supplement the steam engine; Palestro and her sister were the last rigged ironclads to be built by Italy.[2]

Palestro was armed with a main battery of six 10 in (254 mm) guns, mounted in three armored casemates. The first was located forward, toward the bow, the second and third were placed close to the stern on each side of the ship. A 11 in (279 mm) gun was mounted forward as a bow chaser. Palestro was protected by iron belt armor that was 8.7 in (221 mm) thick and extended for the entire length of the hull. The casemates were protected with 5.5 in (140 mm) of iron plating, and the small conning tower had 2.4 in (61 mm) thick iron plates.[2]

The keel for Palestro was laid down at the Regio Cantiere di Castellammare di Stabia shipyard in August 1865.[2] The ship was named for the gunboat Palestro, which had been sunk at the Battle of Lissa in 1866.[3] The date of her launched is unknown, though surviving records indicate either 30 September or 2 October 1871. The ship was completed on 11 July 1875, after almost a decade of work.[2] Obsolescent by the time she was completed, Palestro primarily served in the Italian colonial empire,[4] which Italy had begun acquiring in the 1880s.[5] She occasionally took part in training maneuvers with the main Italian fleet throughout her career.[4]

On 14 November 1880 she assisted with the refloating of the P&O steamship Sumatra, which had run aground at Brindisi.[6] Also in that month, Palestro and the ironclad Roma took part in a naval demonstration off Ragusa in an attempt to force the Ottoman Empire to comply with the terms of the Treaty of Berlin and turn over the town of Ulcinj to Montenegro.[7] Palestro was used as a headquarters ship for the ships defending La Maddalena from 1889 to 1894. She was then used as a training ship for coxswains.[2] Palestro was stationed in La Spezia in 1895 as a special service ship.[8] The ship was stricken from the naval register on 14 April 1900 and broken up for scrap between 1902 and 1904.[2]

• Fraccaroli, Aldo (1979). "Italy". In Gardiner, Robert (ed.). Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860–1905. London: Conway Maritime Press. pp. 334–359. ISBN 978-0-85177-133-5.
• Garbett, H., ed. (1895). "Naval and Military Notes". Journal of the Royal United Service Institution. London: J. J. Keliher & Co. XXXIX (203): 81–110. OCLC 8007941.
• Ordovini, Aldo F.; Petronio, Fulvio & Sullivan, David M. (December 2014). "Capital Ships of the Royal Italian Navy, 1860–1918: Part I: The Formidabile, Principe di Carignano, Re d'Italia, Regina Maria Pia, Affondatore, Roma and Principe Amedeo Classes". Warship International. Vol. 51, no. 4. pp. 323–360. ISSN 0043-0374.
• Pakenham, Thomas (1992). The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. New York: Perennial. ISBN 978-0-380-71999-0.
• "The Naval Demonstration in the Adriatic". The Illustrated London News. London: George C. Leighton. 18 September 1880. p. 278.

• Palestro Marina Militare website (in Italian)