prompting the Regia Marina to order two vessels to match their rival. The designers emphasized very high speed, which required a significant reduction in armor protection to keep the ships within the displacement limit. In addition, they were designed with a narrow beam to help them reach high speeds, which reduced their stability. This would be the general pattern for Italian cruisers and destroyers built in the 1920s and 1930s, with the exception of the later s and some of the later s. While the ships were still on the slipways, officers in the Regia Marina expressed concerns that the thin armor protection of the Trentos would leave the vessels poorly equipped for combat. As a result, the navy ordered the more balanced Zara-class, which featured a significantly thicker scale of armor protection. The lightly-built Trento design nevertheless provided the basis for the s built by Odero Terni Orlando for the Argentine Navy; the Argentine vessels were scaled down slightly, with thinner armor and guns. Another derivative design built for the Italian fleet, , started construction in 1930 and was commissioned in 1933; though the Bolzano was quite different from the other two vessels, she is sometimes considered a member of the Trento class. General characteristics The ships of the Trento class were long between perpendiculars and long overall. They had a beam of and a draft of . They had a design displacement of and they displaced up to at full load, though their displacement was nominally within the 10,000-long-ton restriction set in place by the Washington Naval Treaty. Their hulls had a flush deck and a bulbous bow, the first time the latter feature was employed on an Italian warship. The ships were completed with a pair of tripod masts, though on trials they were found to vibrate excessively, and the foremast was strengthened with two extra legs. They had a crew of 723 officers and enlisted men, though during the war this increased to 781. They carried a pair of IMAM Ro.43 seaplanes for aerial reconnaissance; the hangar was located under the forecastle and a fixed catapult was mounted on the centerline at the bow. The Trento-class cruisers' power plant consisted of four Parsons steam turbines powered by twelve oil-fired Yarrow boilers, which were trunked into two funnels amidships. The boilers were divided into three boiler rooms with four each; two powered the forward engines that drove