Roma

Roma existed because of an arithmetic problem. In December 1935 Admiral Domenico Cavagnari put it to Mussolini that if Britain and France ever combined their Mediterranean fleets, two Littorios and a handful of modernised pre-war battleships would not be enough. Planning for two more ships of the class was authorised in January 1937 and the money voted that December; they were named Roma and Impero. Her keel was laid by Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico on 18 September 1938, launched 9 June 1940, and after two years of fitting out she was commissioned on 14 June 1942.

Coming nearly four years after Vittorio Veneto and Littorio, she took in improvements. Her bow was redesigned for greater freeboard and then modified again mid-construction, on experience with Vittorio Veneto, to give a finer entry at the waterline; she carried thirty-two 20 mm Breda guns where her sisters had twenty-four. At 240.68 metres and 45,485 long tons at full combat load, she would have breached the Washington Treaty's 35,000-ton ceiling had the treaty not expired shortly before her keel was laid.

Four Belluzzo geared turbines rated at 128,000 shaft horsepower, fed by eight oil-fired Yarrow boilers, gave 30 knots. Her main battery was nine 381 mm 50-calibre Model 1934 guns in three triple turrets, two superfiring forward and one aft, with twelve 152 mm guns in four triple turrets amidships and twelve 90 mm anti-aircraft guns in single mounts. Her main belt was 280 mm backed by a further 70 mm of steel, the main deck 162 mm over the vitals, the turrets and barbettes 350 mm. A stern catapult carried three IMAM Ro.43 floatplanes or Reggiane Re.2000 fighters.

Roma reached Taranto on 21 August 1942 and joined the Ninth Naval Division, and there her war effectively stalled. Italy's fuel shortage was severe enough that by the end of 1942 the only combat-ready battleships in the navy were the three Littorios, the four modernised older ships having been withdrawn; with no escorts to spare for capital ships either, the fleet's combat potential was close to nothing. She trained, and she moved between Taranto, Naples and La Spezia, and she went on no combat mission at all.

What she did instead was absorb bombs. Shifted with her sisters to Naples on 12 November 1942 in response to the Allied landings in North Africa — attacked without result by the submarine HMS Umbra on the way — she moved on to La Spezia in December and became flagship of the Regia Marina. Raids on the port through the first half of 1943 missed her in April.

On 5 June an American raid put two B-17-dropped 908-kilogram armour-piercing bombs close alongside her bow; one struck and passed through the hull side before exploding, opening leaks between frames 221 and 226, and about 2,350 long tons of water came aboard. Two more bombs hit on 23–24 June, one obliterating staterooms aft of the rear main turret and flooding them from broken piping, the other landing squarely on the turret itself and doing little against its armour. She went to Genoa for repairs on 1 July and returned to La Spezia on 13 August, three and a half weeks before the armistice.

The fleet had been due to sail against the Allied invasion force off Salerno; the armistice announced on 8 September 1943 cancelled that. Instead Admiral Carlo Bergamini was ordered out of La Spezia to keep his ships from the Germans, and on 9 September Roma sailed as his flagship under Captain Adone Del Cima, with Vittorio Veneto, Italia — the former Littorio — three cruisers and eight destroyers, joined later by three more cruisers out of Genoa. The destination changed twice: La Maddalena in Sardinia was abandoned when German troops occupied the base, and Supermarina redirected the fleet to Allied-held Bône.

Once Germany understood the fleet was steering for an Allied port, Kampfgeschwader 100 sent Dornier Do 217s armed with Fritz X radio-controlled bombs. The aircraft shadowed the ships for some time without being fired on: they were too distant to identify, and Bergamini took them for the air cover the Allies had promised. At 15:37, in the Strait of Bonifacio, the attack came. Roma was hit on the starboard side between frames 100 and 108 by a bomb that passed through the ship and detonated beneath the keel, damaging the hull girder, flooding the after engine room and two boiler rooms, stopping the inboard propellers for want of power and starting electrical fires aft through arcing.

Losing speed, she fell out of the formation. At about 16:02 a second Fritz X struck the starboard side of her deck between frames 123 and 136 and most likely burst in the forward engine room, flooding the magazines of number two main turret and a forward secondary turret and loading the already strained hull girder further. Seconds later those magazines detonated and threw the 15-inch turret bodily over the side. Going down by the bow and listing further to starboard, Roma capsized and broke in two.

The official inquest counted 1,849 aboard and 596 survivors. Naval historian Francesco Mattesini, citing research by Bergamini's son Pier Paolo, notes that about two hundred men of the admiral's staff were aboard and were left out of the count — putting 2,021 on the ship and 1,393 dead, Bergamini and Rear Admiral Stanislao Caraciotti among them. In fifteen months of commissioned life Roma had made twenty sorties, none of them into combat, covering 2,492 miles in 133 hours of steaming.

Roma lay unfound for sixty-nine years. The wreck was located in June 2012 by Pluto Palla, an underwater robot designed by the Italian engineer Guido Gay, about 30 kilometres off the northern coast of Sardinia at a depth of around 1,000 metres — close enough to the Sardinian shore that the ship had been within sight of home water when the Fritz X found her. She had been the newest and largest unit of the Italian fleet, and she was lost on the one voyage she made as a ship of a country no longer at war with the Allies.

On 10 September 2012 a memorial ceremony was held aboard an Italian frigate over the spot where she went down. Giampaolo Di Paola, then defence minister and himself a former naval officer, spoke of the dead as 'unwitting heroes who found their place in history because they carried out their duty right until the end' — a fair description of a crew killed on the day their war changed sides. The last surviving member of Roma's crew from that afternoon died in May 2025.