a marked disadvantage in numbers and equipment, superior handling by the Austrians under Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff resulted in a severe defeat for Italy, which lost two armoured ships and 640 men. Decline and resurgence After the war, the Regia Marina passed through some difficult years as the naval budget was substantially reduced, thus impairing the fleet's efficiency and the pace of new construction; only in the 1870s, under Simone Pacoret de Saint Bon's ministry, did the situation begin to improve. In 1881, the battleship was commissioned, followed in 1882 by the battleship ; at the time these were the most powerful warships in the world, and signalled the Italian fleet's renewed power. In 1896 the corvette Magenta completed a circumnavigation of the world. The following year the Regia Marina conducted experiments with Guglielmo Marconi in the use of radio communications. 1909 saw the first use of aircraft with the fleet. An Italian naval officer, Vittorio Cuniberti, was the first in 1903 to envision in a published article the all-big gun battleship design, which would be later come to be known as dreadnought. Italo-Turkish War In 1911 and 1912, the Regia Marina was involved in the Italo-Turkish War against forces of the Ottoman Empire. As the majority of the Ottoman Navy stayed behind the relative safety of the Dardanelles, the Italians dominated the Mediterranean during the conflict winning victories against Ottoman light units at the battles of Preveza and Beirut. In the Red Sea the Italian forces were vastly superior to those of the Ottomans who possessed only a squadron of gunboats there. These were destroyed while attempting to withdraw into the Mediterranean at the Battle of Kunfuda Bay. World War I Before 1914, the Kingdom of Italy built six dreadnought battleships: ( as a prototype; , and of the ; and and of the ), but they did not participate in major naval actions in World War I, as they were positioned to intercept a major sortie of the Austro-Hungarian Navy which never came. During the war, the Regia Marina spent its major efforts in the Adriatic Sea, fighting the Austro-Hungarian Navy. The resulting Adriatic Campaign of World War I consisted mainly of Austro-Hungarian coastal bombardments of Italy's Adriatic coast, and wider-ranging German/Austro-Hungarian submarine warfare into the Mediterranean. Allied forces mainly limited themselves to blockading the German/Austro-Hungarian navies in the Adriatic, which was successful in regards to surface units,