Dear Readers,
A May mix of Italian Connections for you: Affairs of the heart, or parts south, are legally protected in Italy under the U.S. equivalent of “taking the fifth”, the constitutional provision against self-incrimination.
Lying under oath about affairs is legal in Italy. Italians cannot be punished for lying to police about their love affairs, Italy’s highest court ruled. The ruling came in a case in which a woman lent her cell phone to her lover, who used it to make harassing calls to her husband. When police asked whether she knew the caller, she said no – and was later indicted for obstructing justice.
The court, though, decided that denying an affair is a matter of self-protection, and falls under the law that says Italians cannot be forced to incriminate themselves. “Having a lover is a circumstance that damages the honor of a person,” the court ruled, so it is every Italian’s right to hide that circumstance and make love but not start a war.
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Alcohol was first distilled at the Salerno School of Medicine in the year 1000 A.D. Large scale production of alcohol, however, is recorded for the first time at Modena in the thirteenth century.
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Andrea Doria, the Italian luxury liner mortally wounded in 1956 and the Titanic, which sank in 1912, were thought to be unsinkable” and therefore underinsured. While the Titanic tragedy was before my time, with the Andrea Doria I do remember hearing about “paesani” who fortunately “missed the boat” due to personal or work related delayed departure dates, or who had been aboard but survived.
After the initial news splash, owners of the two ships involved (Andrea Doria and Stockholm) agreed it would be better to avoid a public trial because bad publicity would undermine the public’s confidence in ocean travel and with travel editors of many newspapers fearing declining revenues in tacit approval, the ship was soon off their readership’s radar, but some 95 passengers lost their lives, in this Italian connected sea disaster, so it never was completely off mine…
Piero Calamai was captain of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria, which sailed between Europe and America. Calamai had forty years of experience at sea and an unblemished safety record. His ship, just three years old, was one of the most expensive well-equipped passenger ships in service. On July 25, 1956, the Andrea Doria was heading for New York Harbor on the ninth day of voyage from Genoa, Italy.
Captain Calamai often encountered fog near Nantucket and took his usual precautions. He ordered the foghorn to be sounded, posted a lookout on the bow, ordered the ship’s eleven watertight compartments to be shut, and reduced his speed a nominal amount. Calamai was confident that his radar, set at the twenty-mile range, would detect any object that might pose a danger to his ship.
The Andrea Doria was about fifty miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, when Second Officer Franchini alerted Calamai that the radar indicated a vessel seventeen miles away was coming towards them. Captain Calamai thought it was probably a fishing vessel, because he had never encountered another large ship in these waters and thought that the small craft would soon veer away, so he did not slow down or took any evasive action. Twenty minutes later the radar showed that the oncoming vessel was still on the same course.
Calamai decided to turn left so as to pass the other ship off his starboard (right) side. Calamai believed he was facing a small vessel that was already on his right side. He also assumed that when that vessel heard his foghorn, it would head in closer to shore. Unfortunately the other ship was not a fishing trawler headed for Nantucket Island but another ocean liner, the Stockholm, en route from New York to Sweden. On the bridge of the Stockholm, the ship’s Third Officer Carstens-Johannsen, was on duty while his captain, Gunnar Nordenson, was in his day room below the bridge. Carstens had been watching the approaching Andrea Doria on his radar.
Carstens had good visibility, so he was surprised he could not see the lights of the oncoming vessel. He did not consider the possibility that there was fog ahead obscuring his vision. The two ships were traveling towards each other at a combined speed of approximately 40 knots, or 1.5 miles per minute. Entering the outer edge of the fog, Carstens caught sight of the Andrea Doria, immediately reversed his engines and turned right to avoid hitting the other ship, but neglected to signal his turn by blowing his whistle. Captain Calamai saw the Stockholm materialize in the fog to his right. To avoid impact he turned left.
He did not reverse engines, hoping that speed would help him turn more quickly and avoid impact. Unfortunately, the two ships turned toward each other. It was 11:08 p.m. Within seconds there was a thunderous sound as the bow of the Stockholm pierced the side of the Andrea Doria, penetrating thirty feet into the side of the Italian ship. Seconds later the luxury liner, still moving at full speed, tore away from the Stockholm, but seawater began pouring into the hole in the side of the Andrea Doria.
The Stockholm drifted away, its bow crushed in, and its forward holding tank filling with water. Captain Calamai stopped the engines of the Andrea Doria and ordered the watertight doors closed. Calamai wanted to be sure that the eleven watertight chambers were all sealed off from one another, so they would keep the ship from sinking. But, a report from the engine room indicated that the starboard-side fuel tanks, almost empty near the end of a long voyage, had been split open on impact and were filling with seawater, while the tanks on the port side, also nearly depleted of fuel, were full of air.
This imbalance was causing the ship to list twenty degrees. Calamai knew that the eleven watertight chambers were built to contain all flooding at a list of up to fifteen degrees, but at twenty degrees, water could flow from one flooded chamber to another. He realized that the Andrea Doria was at great risk of sinking. Both ships sent out distress calls that were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and relayed to all ships in the area. Shortly after midnight captain Nordenson received a transcribed radio message from Calamai: “You are one nautical mile away from us. Please come immediately and pick up our passengers.”
As soon as captain Nordenson was confident the Stockholm was not in danger of sinking, he dispatched seven of his eleven lifeboats to the Andrea Doria. Within an hour, three more ships arrived, the cargo ship Cape Ann, the Navy transport Private William H. Thomas and the Ile de France.
There were thirty lifeboats transporting survivors from the Andrea Doria to the Stockholm, which brought aboard 572 survivors, and to other ships, which took in the rest. By 5 a.m. on July 26, the Andrea Doria was totally evacuated except for Captain Calamai. Calamai had called for tugboats to tow the ship to Nantucket, hoping that they might arrive before the Andrea Doria sank. She was now listing at forty degrees. He waited another half-hour and then stepped into a lifeboat, the last to leave his ship. Helicopters arrived to transport five injured persons to hospitals in Nantucket and Boston.
Forty-six people aboard the Andrea Doria and five aboard the Stockholm died that day. Of the Andrea Doria’s 1,706 passengers and crew, 1,660 were rescued and shortly after 10:00 a.m. the “unsinkable” Andrea Doria sank… After six months of hearings and negotiations, the companies reached an out-of-court settlement by which each party would bear the cost of its own losses and would cooperate in settling all other claims. Captain Calamai never recovered from the shock of losing his ship.
He reflected, “When I was a boy, and all my life, I loved the sea; now I hate it.” Captain Calamai never commanded another ship. The Stockholm became the property of an Italian Cruise Line, repaired and renamed Motonave Italia. As late as 2006 it was cruising the Tyrrenian and Adriatic seas in Italy.
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