Michelangelo (ship, 1965)
 The Michelangelo in New York in 1971
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The Michelangelo was a transatlantic passenger steamer put into service in 1965 for the Italian shipping company Italia - Società di Navigazione ( Italian Line ).
The name refers to the famous Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarrotti (1475–1564).
The ship
The Michelangelo was, as her almost simultaneously built sister ship Raffaello , 275.50 meters long, 31.20 meters wide and had a maximum draft of 10.40 meters. It could carry 1,771 passengers, 531 of them in first class, 550 in cabin class and 690 in tourist class. The ship was powered by four steam turbines. The average cruising speed was 26.5 knots and the top speed was just under 32 knots. The two sister ships not only stood out for their sleek and elegant silhouette, but also for their unusual design. The fuselage was not painted black, as is usually the case with passenger steamers, but painted completely white. The chimneys were surrounded by a birdcage-like latticework and equipped with long, black spoilers to deflect smoke and soot.
period of service
The Michelangelo was launched on September 15, 1962. The ship's godmother was the Italian film actress Virna Lisi . On 5 May 1965, was Michelangelo in Genoa on her maiden voyage to New York from.
On April 12, 1966, the Michelangelo , which had 1,495 passengers and crew on board, got caught in a strong storm in the Atlantic and was hit by a huge wave that damaged the superstructure of the fore ship considerably. The incident killed two passengers and one crew member, and injured more than 50 passengers. Among the passengers on this trip were Günter Grass with his wife, the American cartoonist Bob Montana ( Archie Comics ) with his wife and children, and Admiral Ernesto Giurati, President of the Italian Line .
With increasing competition from commercial air traffic , the Michelangelo was already losing passengers at the end of the 1960s and soon could no longer be operated economically; on some voyages the number of crew members even exceeded the number of passengers. The ship could only sail for a few more years with the help of state subsidies. The shipping company tried to cut costs by reducing the crew, shortening lay times and reducing speed. In addition, the ship was also used as a cruise ship for a while, for which, however, it turned out to be unsuitable. But the Michelangelo and her sister ship continued to incur high losses. In 1975 the state stopped paying subsidies and the Società Italia decided to put the Michelangelo and Raffaello out of service after just ten years. The two ships were laid up first in Genoa and then in La Spezia .
Use as a houseboat
After several prospective buyers had inspected the ships with no results and the Società di Navigazione had rejected an offer to buy from the Italian shipping company Home Lines , the Michelangelo and Raffaello were finally sold to the Shah of Persia in early 1977, where they were intended to be used as a barge. The Michelangelo left Genoa in July of the same year and reached its new location in Bandar Abbas, where it was converted into a floating barracks for 1,800 soldiers. While the Raffaello was set on fire in an Iraqi air raid in 1983 and capsized, the Michelangelo , which had kept its name to the end under the Iranian flag, was used as soldiers' accommodation until 1991; then it was taken out of service, sold to a Pakistani scrapping company and towed to Gadani near Karachi in June 1991 and scrapped there.
literature
- Simone Bandini, Maurizio Elisio: Michelangelo e Raffaello. La fine di un'epoca Hoepli, 2010, ISBN 978-8820341190 .
- Jaroslav Coplák, Pavol Pevný: passenger ships. Dausien, 1996, ISBN 3-7684-0570-2 .
- Tony Gibson: The world of ships . Basserman Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8094-2186-3 , page 191.
Web links
- Technical and historical key data (in Swedish)
- Project Michelangelo (English and Italian)
- Filming of the Michelangelo
Footnotes
- ↑ Daniel Othfors: Michelangelo. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 3, 2016 ; accessed on December 22, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Kurt Ulrich: The last voyage of the "Michelangelo". (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 22, 2015 ; accessed on December 22, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Gordon Ghareeb: MICHELANGELO And The Hurricane. November 7, 2012, accessed December 22, 2015 .
