Liner (1f/2m).
L/B:
630.1 × 79.8 (192m × 24.3m). Tons:
29,082 grt. Hull:
steel. Comp.:
1st 218, cabin 320, tourist 703; 563 crew. Mach.:
geared turbines, 2 screws; 26 kts. Built:
Ansaldo Societá per Azioni, Genoa; 1953.
Andrea Doria was the first passenger liner built to run in North Atlantic service for the Italia Societá per Azioni di Navigazione (Italian Line) after World War II. Named for the sixteenth-century Genoese admiral, the luxury liner entered service between Genoa and New York on July 25, 1953, making intermediate stops at Cannes and Naples. She shared this route with her sister ship Cristoforo Colombo, which entered service a year later. On July 17, 1956, Andrea Doria departed Genoa on her fifty-first crossing of the Atlantic, and by the evening of the twenty-fifth she was speeding though the foggy approaches to Nantucket Sound when she was rammed by the Swedish-America Line passenger ship
Stockholm, outward bound from New York. Although the Swedish-America Line ship had appeared on Andrea Doria's radar screen, there was no effort to take evasive action until it was too late. At 2345, Stockholm knifed thirty feet into Andrea Doria's starboard side and forty-three people aboard the Italian liner were killed instantly. A watertight bulkhead was also destroyed in the collision, and the ship began to list so severely that she was unable to launch her starboard lifeboats. Captain Piero Calamai issued a distress call and by 0430, the 1,663 passengers and crew who had survived the collision had been taken aboard the French Line's
Ile de France, the freighter Cape Ann, the navy transport Pvt. William H. Thomas, and Stockholm. The pride of the Italian merchant fleet sank at 1009 the following morning. An inquiry into the cause of the disaster was settled out of court between the two lines. In the mid-1980s, Peter Gimbel led a series of dives on the wreck. The ship's safe was salvaged, but more important, his photographs demonstrated that the ship's watertight integrity had been destroyed in the collision and that the ship's loss was not an engineering defect, as some had suspected.
Hoffer, Saved!.
