SS Roma (1926)

SS Roma was an Italian transatlantic ocean liner, built by the Ansaldo shipyard at Sestri Ponente for Navigazione Generale Italiana of Genoa and launched in 1926. She measured 32,583 gross register tons, had an all steel hull and Baroque style interiors, and could carry about 1,675 passengers in four classes. Unlike her sister ship Augustus she was driven by eight steam turbines coupled in pairs to four shafts, fed by thirteen boilers, for a top speed of 22 knots, and some of her machinery came from the cancelled battleship Cristoforo Colombo. She passed to the new Italian Line after the merger, and in 1932 she rammed the American liner President Roosevelt at New York. When the Second World War broke out she was laid up and then taken over by the navy and rebuilt as the aircraft carrier Aquila, which was never finished. She was partially sunk in 1945, raised, and scrapped by 1952.