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The harbor at Genoa, 1895. Ansaldo's yard has a problem. The Italian Navy ordered these ships. The Italian Navy cannot pay for all of them.
The lead cruiser is named Giuseppe Garibaldi, after the man who unified Italy. The irony of selling her abroad apparently bothered no one.
Edoardo Masdea designed them. Seven thousand tons. Four guns in two turrets, fore and aft. Belt armor. 20 knots. Good ships. The kind other navies wanted.
Argentina was first. War with Chile had been building for years: troops massing along the Andes, both sides buying whatever Europe would sell. Argentina bought four hulls. Then Britain brokered the 1902 Pacts of May, the crisis dissolved, and Argentina found itself with more cruisers than enemies.
Spain bought one. Cristóbal Colón. She sailed to Cuba in 1898 to fight the Americans. Spain's Navy Ministry had rejected her 254mm main guns over a dispute with the manufacturer. The war started before replacements arrived. She sailed into battle with wooden dummies in the turrets.
At Santiago Bay on July 3rd, she ran. Made 14 knots trying to escape the U.S. fleet, exhausted her good coal, switched to Cuban coal, slowed down, and was run aground. The dummies never fired. She was the finest armored cruiser in the Spanish fleet.
Japan was next. They wanted two: Nisshin and Kasuga, which Argentina had ordered and no longer needed. Japan bought them while the ships were still at sea. The paperwork was signed in January 1904. Russia and Japan went to war on February 8th.
Kasuga arrived eight days later.
On May 15, 1904, after shelling Port Arthur, Kasuga collided in fog with the Japanese cruiser Yoshino. Yoshino rolled over and sank. 319 men went down with her. Friendly fire, three months into the war.
Both ships were at Tsushima in May 1905. The Russian Baltic Fleet had spent seven months and 18,000 miles getting there. The battle lasted two days. Russia lost 21 warships, 5,000 men killed, 6,000 captured. Nisshin and Kasuga survived.
They were still in service when WWI started. Escort duties. Patrols. Quiet work for ships that had already seen enough.
Italy kept the name alive. The seventh ship of the class was christened Giuseppe Garibaldi, inheriting it from the lead ship already sailing under Argentine colors. On July 18, 1915, she was on a bombardment mission off the Dalmatian coast when the Austro-Hungarian submarine U-4 put one torpedo into her starboard side near the boiler rooms.
She went down in three minutes.
Her wreck is still there. 122 meters down, southeast of Dubrovnik. Upside down.