The Report of the Russian Naval Agent on the Construction of New Battleships in Italy

The article deals with the construction of new battleships in Italy from the report of the naval agent in the Italian Kingdom Nomer 1797 dated March 9, 1881. Particular attention is paid to the issue of developing a new fleet construction program, which provided for experiments on the armor of ships. It was in 1878 that a special commission for the construction of ships expressed the opinion that ships should be built according to the Italia type, but of a smaller volume. Now the Ministry was determining the volume, leaning especially on a smaller deepening, on the speedy construction of new ships instead of the old ones that were falling into disrepair, on the need to have a certain number of ships to meet state requirements, and most importantly on the implementation of the law of July 1, 1877, which stated that ships of the 1st class should be capable of actions of all kinds. Instead of one ship like "Italia", the ministry wanted to lay ships according to their projects. During the preparation of the article, some spelling and syntactic features of the cited archival materials were preserved.