Conte di Cavour was the name ship of the three dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Italian Navy () in the 1910s. Completed in 1915 she served during World War I, although she was little used and saw no combat. The ship supported operations during the Corfu Incident in 1923 and spent much of the rest of the decade in reserve. She was rebuilt between 1933 and 1937 with more powerful guns, additional armor and considerably more speed than before. During World War II, both Conte di Cavour and her sister ship, , participated in the Battle of Calabria in July 1940, where the latter was lightly damaged. Conte di Cavour was badly damaged when British torpedo bombers attacked the fleet at Taranto in November 1940. She was deliberately run aground, with most of her hull underwater, and repairs were not completed before the Italian armistice in September 1943. The ship was then captured by the Germans, but they made no effort to finish her repairs. She was damaged in an Allied air raid in early 1945 and capsized a week later. Conte di Cavour was eventually scrapped in 1946. Description The Conte di Cavour class was designed to counter the French dreadnoughts which caused them to be slower and more heavily armored than the first Italian dreadnought, . The ships were long at the waterline and overall. They had a beam of , and a draft of . The Conte di Cavour-class ships displaced at normal load, and at deep load. They had a crew of 31 officers and 969 enlisted men. The ships were powered by three sets of Parsons steam turbines, two sets driving the outer propeller shafts and one set the two inner shafts. Steam for the turbines was provided by twenty Blechynden water-tube boilers, eight of which burned oil and twelve of which burned both fuel oil and coal. Designed to reach a maximum speed of from , Conte di Cavour failed to reach this goal on her sea trials, despite mildly exceeding the rated power of her turbines, reaching only from . The ships carried enough coal and oil to give them a range of at . Armament and armor The main battery of the Conte di Cavour class consisted of thirteen 305-millimeter Model 1909 guns, in five centerline gun turrets, with a twin-gun turret superfiring over a triple-gun turret in fore and aft