SS Raffaello in New York 21 April 1975

#Raffaello #OceanLiner #NewYork #ItalianLiner

SS Raffaello in New York 21 April 1975
The video was originally a silent super 8mm cine film digitally converted using a Winait scanner. I also added sound effects.
The film shows the Raffaello with a tour on the main deck followed by the ship leaving its' berth & heading for its final voyage. SS Kungsholm is berthed nearby.

SS Raffaello was an Italian ocean liner built in the early 1960s for Italian Line by the Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico, Trieste. It was one of the last ships to be built primarily for liner service across the North Atlantic. Her sister ship was SS Michelangelo.

In 1958, the Italian Line began planning new ships to replace the ageing Saturnia & Vulcania. Competition from jet airliners had not yet had a huge impact in the Mediterranean area & jobs were needed for Italian sailors & shipyard workers, so constructing new superliners seemed like an attractive idea to Italian Line executives. Consequently, the new ships grew from the originally planned 35,000 tons to nearly 46,000 tons.

The Italian Line planned the ships as true ocean liners, divided into 3 classes. Oddly even for a liner, all cabins below A-deck were windowless, but on the technical side the ships were among the most advanced of their time. They featured retractable stabiliser wings, highly modernised engineering panels, & many other advantages. The funnels, in particular, were especially designed to keep smoke & soot from the rear decks. The funnel design proved to be highly effective, & it is a testament to their design that most funnels in modern passenger ships are built along similar principles.

The new ships' interiors were in the Art Deco style so often associated with liners. Raffaello's interiors were designed by architects such as Michele & Giancarlo Busiri Vici, who had not worked on liner interiors before. As a result, Raffaello gained highly futuristic, more distinctive, but more sterile interiors than the Michelangelo. Despite being planned as identical ships, Raffaello was 0.7 meters shorter, 0.40 meters wider, & approximately 22 tons larger than the Michelangelo.

It took 5 years to finish Raffaello, a long time even by the standards of the day. The ship was further delayed when stern vibrations were discovered during the first sea trials. The ship's propellers & transmission system were modified to eliminate the vibrations. The modifications were successful & the ship was finally ready for service in July 1965.

In 1966 Raffaello carried two Spider 1600 cars bound for an exhibition in the USA. The cars were even driven on the ship's first-class lido decks, a 1st for an ocean liner. In 1970 Raffaello became the 1st ship whose theatre stage was converted into a skating rink & skating shows were performed for passengers. In 1970 the ship suffered the most serious accident of its career when it collided with a Norwegian oil tanker off the south coast of Spain in May 1970. No lives were lost.

Although Raffaello was the larger of the two ships, and its interiors more distinctive, it was always the less important ship in the eyes of Italian Line executives. As a result, when the transatlantic traffic started declining due to competition from air traffic, Raffaello was sent cruising in order to make more money while Michelangelo was used strictly for crossings. Raffaello was not very well suited for cruising. Although it did have a large amount of open deck space, the ship was too large, its cabins too small, & most of them too spartan for demanding cruise passengers.

The Italian Line decided to withdraw Raffaello in April 1975, after the Italian Government announced that it would not further subsidize the ship (by 1975, it was paying 100 million lire per day, or about $151,500 at the then-current exchange rate, to keep it sailing). Initially laid up in Genoa & later in La Spezia near the scrapyard, Raffaello & Michelangelo were inspected by several potential buyers such as Norwegian Cruise Line, Costa Amatori, Chandris Group, & Home Lines. The last even made a serious offer to buy the ships, despite large rebuilding costs, but the Italia Line rejected the offer.

In 1976 the Shah of Iran bought the 2 ships for $4m. They had cost a $90m in 1965. Raffaello made its final journey late in the same year fm La Spezia into Bushehr, where it served as a floating barracks for the next 7 years.
In 1978 plans emerged to resurrect Michelangelo & Raffaello as cruise ships. But Italian specialists sent to evaluate the ships' condition realized the ships were too decrepit to make reconstruction financially viable. Raffaello stayed in its moorings. The ship was heavily damaged & looted during the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Raffaello had been hit by a missile during the Iran–Iraq War in 1983 & partially sank in shallow waters outside Bushehr. Sometime later the wreck was rammed by an Iranian cargo ship. Local divers further looted the hull in later years

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