Two ships into one: the technique that Genoa has forgotten

Genoa - Outside of Civitavecchia, the Nathaniel Bacon is struggling to take to sea. The ship is loaded with canned goods, probably headed for Rome, still marked by the war - we are in the last days of 1946. The wind is freezing and the water is white with foam. The mines which have not yet been cleared, are just a little way away. A stronger gust of wind, and the cargo ship’s prow, out of control, ends up among the mines. The explosion is fierce, and only the stern of the Nathaniel remains. Two years later, spring 1948, it is once again the fury of the wind which pushes the Bert Williams - which is already in a precarious condition having been re-floated after running aground on a coral reef - onto the beach at Marsa Matruk, in Egypt. The sea puts an end to the ship, and only the prow remains afloat, towed into the port of Taranto. These two ships were some of the 2,710 Liberty cargo ships built in the United States during the Second World War. The small cargo ships in the American fleet, which by the end of the war made up 46% of the global merchant fleet and a large percentage of which Congress decided to put up for sale. A total of 162 of these went to Italy: the Italian-flagged merchant fleet was rebuilt from these small units, which had been reduced to almost zero by the end of the war.

The old dynasties were joined by new shipping companies, a few of which would dominate the market, while others turned out to be short lived. Of Industriale Marittima - which ordered the Boccadasse, the first and last ship built from the prow and stern of two other ships - there remains only one reference in the historical archive of the Banca Commerciale Italiana. The creator of the Boccadasse in 1950, was Angelo Cassanello, the Director of the Officine Meccaniche Navali Campanella, who was at the peak of his career at that time. Pietro Campanella, the son of the founder, Tito, was the President of Genoa’s association of industrialists in the early post-war years, and the same Cassanello was one of the founders of the naval repairs association. The plants at Savona and Genoa (one for building ships, the other for repairing them) were still far from the crisis of the 1980s, from their sale and splitting up. The work of Genoa’s tradesmen under Cassanello’s direction produced what the Americans called the “super-Liberty” a ship that was 136 metres long instead of the standard 137, and about 700 tonnes deadweight. The innovation was in the manner in which operations were conducted, that is by electric welding, and the company that provided this technology - the Swedish company ESAB - is the only one of the companies in this story that still exists.

For some time the Boccadasse sailed seas all over the world, until it was dismantled in 1962, at La Spezia. Cassanello’s work, however, continued to advance for a long time. Another case of “naval surgery” - as people at Campanella love to describe this operation - was carried out in 1960 with the creation of the Albaro (for the shipping company of the same name, which was then merged into “Tito Campanella di Navigazione”) to which was added the prow of another Liberty, the Priaruggia. Another ship that was lengthened is the Tito Campanella, however the work on that ship goes back to 1952, and it doesn’t seem to be the Alfamar unit that sank in 1984 in the Bay of Biscay, which was created in 1962 in Livorno. One final job was carried out on the Agostino Napoleone, between 1967 and 1968, a unit which - created in 1964 - under the name of Maria Lucia G., is still operational in the Canary Islands, under the Panamanian flag and owned by Penn Masters of Tenerife.