Rubattino
The Rubattino shipping company was an Italian shipping company founded in 1835 by the Genoese Raffaele Rubattino (1810–1881).
Since 1853 Rubattino also held shares in the Genoese shipbuilding company Ansaldo , which was also active in railway construction. The Rubattino shipping company was involved in the unification of Italy in 1860 when it enabled Giuseppe Garibaldi's train of a thousand to go to Sicily . After the shipping company got into economic difficulties, it was merged with the Florio shipping company from Palermo under the direction of Credito Mobiliare to form Navigazione Generale Italiana .
The shipping company founded by Rubattino developed after the unification of Italy into a promoter and pioneer of Italian colonialism .
As early as 1869 she bought some shares on the Suez Canal . In the same year she acquired land in the Bay of Assab , which she expanded in 1870 and 1880 and sold to the Italian government in 1882. Similar investments in the Tunisian port of La Goulette (Rubattino had acquired the concession for the railway line to Tunis in 1880), however, failed due to the rapid occupation of Tunisia by France in 1881.
Even Karl May mentioned the Rubattino shipping company's engagement in Tunis in 1882 in Christ or Mohammed .