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''Marco Polo'' was an armored cruiser built for the Royal Italian Navy (''Regia Marina'') in the 1890s, the first of her type in Italian service. The ship spent the bulk of her career deployed in the Far East. Between deployments she participated in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 during which she caused a diplomatic incident with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After that affair ''Marco Polo'' was sent to Libya where she bombarded the towns of Homs, and Zuara and the defenses of the Dardanelles. In between these operations, the ship provided naval gunfire support to the Royal Italian Army in Libya. Due to her age, ''Marco Polo'' did not play a significant role in World War I, serving as an accommodation ship in Venice until she began conversion into a troopship in 1917. After a series of renamings in 1920–21, the ship was stricken from the naval register in 1922 and subsequently sold for scrap. ==Design and description== ''Marco Polo'' was begun as an improved protected cruiser, but she was modified while under construction into an armored cruiser, the first such ship in Italian service. The ship had a length between perpendiculars of and an overall length of . She had a beam of and a draft of . ''Marco Polo'' displaced at normal load, and about at deep load. The ship had a complement of 22 officers and 372 enlisted men.〔Fraccaroli, p. 27〕 She was powered by two vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one propeller shaft. Steam for the engines was supplied by four Scotch marine boilers and their exhausts were trunked into a pair of funnels amidships. Rated at , her engines were designed to give ''Marco Polo'' a speed of , but the ship only reached a speed of during her sea trials even though the engines produced .〔Chesneau & Kolesnik, p. 350〕 She had a cruising radius of about at a speed of .〔Silverstone, p. 285〕 ''Marco Polo''s main armament consisted of six 40-caliber guns in single mounts. One of these guns was each mounted at the bow and stern and the remaining four at the corners of the central citadel in armored casemates. Ten 40-caliber guns served as the ship's secondary armament. They were all mounted on the broadside, four in unprotected embrasures in the hull sides and the other six on the upper deck protected by gun shields. For defense against torpedo boats, the ship carried nine quick-firing (QF) guns and two QF Hotchkiss guns. The ship was also equipped with five torpedo tubes.〔 The ship was protected by a armored belt that only protected the middle of her hull. The upper strake of armor was also 100 mm thick and protected just the middle of the ship, up to the height of the upper deck. The armored deck was thick. The armor of the conning tower and the gun shields were both thick.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Italian cruiser Marco Polo」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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