after the end of the war, both having been stricken in 1920. Regina Margherita class The pattern of experimentation in Italian capital ship construction continued with the Regina Margherita class. The negative experience with the Ammiraglio di Saint Bon class convinced the constructors, led by Benedetto Brin, to design a larger battleship that could engage its foreign counterparts. The new class was designed specifically to counter the new s of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. For this purpose, the ships were armed with the gun that had become standard for most pre-dreadnought battleships of the day. As was typical for Italian capital ships of the period, armor protection was reduced in order to secure high speed. Brin died during the construction process, and the Italian Navy named the second vessel after him. The two ships also saw action in the Italo-Turkish War, alongside the Ammiraglio di Saint Bon class in the 3rd Division of the fleet. Benedetto Brin took part in the attack on Tripoli in October 1911, and both ships were involved in the campaign to seize Rhodes in the eastern Aegean Sea. The Regina Margherita class had become obsolete by the outbreak of World War I and had been reduced to training ships. Both were lost during the war: Benedetto Brin to an internal explosion in Brindisi in September 1915, and Regina Margherita to a German mine in December 1916. Regina Elena class The final class of Italian pre-dreadnoughts were designed by Vittorio Cuniberti, the naval architect whose projected design for the first "all-big-gun" battleship would quickly make the Regina Elena class obsolescent. These ships sacrificed two of the 12-inch guns to obtain a powerful secondary battery of twelve guns. Their high speed—the fastest of any battleship then built, including the revolutionary, turbine-powered —permitted them to also engage cruisers. All four ships served in the 1st Division of the Italian fleet during the Italo-Turkish War, and were the workhorses of the operations off North Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean. During World War I, the ships were primarily based in Brindisi, Taranto, and Valona; they saw no action during the war due to the cautious fleet policies adopted by both the Italian and Austro-Hungarian navies. The ships remained in the Italian fleet for a few years after the war, but all were discarded and broken up for scrap by 1927. Dreadnoughts Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri was the first dreadnought battleship