The night of August 2, 1916, will long be remembered in Taranto, for just before midnight the whole town was awakened by a tremendous explosion. The people leapt from their beds and rushed towards the harbour, to find searchlights sweeping the bay and the finest battleship in the Italian Navy belching forth flames and smoke. The _Leonardo da Vinci_ was doomed. In a moment 250 officers and men were wiped out of existence, and although the survivors fought most valiantly to quell the fire that enveloped the ship their efforts were vain. Suddenly the decks of the battleship canted beneath them, shooting them like flies into the bay, and she swung right over and sank upside-down in 36 feet of water. The searchlights from the surrounding battleships lit up the darkness. Round and round they flashed, seeking the enemy who had dealt this mortal blow; but there was no sign of a periscope, nothing but the heads of the Italian sailors fighting for their lives in the sea. A time bomb, secretly introduced into one of the magazines, had robbed the Allies of one of their most powerful battleships. This loss of a first-class ship of 24,000 tons, equipped with an armament of thirteen 12-inch guns, was a grave one to the Italian Navy, and the question of salving her at once arose. Famous foreign experts came on the scene, gazed on the visible portion of the keel of the ship which had cost £4,000,000, and shook their heads dubiously. “Impossible!” they said. “The only thing to do is to blow her to pieces.” The eyes of the Italians flashed. Somehow, at some time, they determined to salve the battleship. It might be impossible during the war, owing to the difficulty of getting material for the operations, but in their own minds the honour of Italy would never be satisfied until the ship which lay at the bottom of Taranto bay once more floated on the seas. The sinking of the _Leonardo da Vinci_ was, indeed, a great blow to the pride of the Italian Navy, and there was a general desire on the part of the nation to wipe out the stain and turn defeat into a triumph by refloating the ship. The more difficult the task, the greater the triumph; the more impossible it seemed to foreign experts, the more determined were the Italians to achieve it. Throwing themselves heart and soul into the matter, the officers of the Italian Naval Engineering Corps studied the problem most carefully and formulated several schemes, among them a plan to build around the ship a floating dock which, when completely pumped out, would automatically lift the wreck. Shortage of steel and other materials at that time made this plan impracticable. Then General Ferrati, the chief of the Italian naval constructors, evolved a plan to raise the ship by means of compressed air and carry her upside-down to the dry dock at Taranto, where she could be prepared for righting.