Italian training ships cross paths in the Atlantic on the way to Lisbon and Porto
The Italian Navy's sail training ship Orsa Maggiore, carrying third-year cadets of the Naval Academy in Livorno, has met the command and logistic support ship Etna in the Atlantic. Orsa Maggiore is bound for Lisbon on the return leg of a summer training campaign that this year took it as far as London; Etna is heading for Porto with the academy's second-year cadets. The Italian Navy announced the encounter on its official social media channels without giving a date or position.
In brief
The Italian sail training ship Orsa Maggiore, carrying third-year cadets of the Naval Academy in Livorno, met the logistic support ship Etna with second-year cadets in the Atlantic. Orsa Maggiore is sailing to Lisbon and Etna to Porto; the Marina Militare gave neither the date nor the position of the encounter. Orsa Maggiore is a 28.3 m ketch with 802 m² of sail, in service since 1995, which at the end of August passed up the Thames under Tower Bridge for the first time in its history. The roughly 146 m long Etna has served since 1998 and regularly acts as a floating school for younger year groups.
Two hulls, two year groups
The Italian Navy splits its officer cadets between vessels at opposite ends of the fleet. Orsa Maggiore is a 28.3 m ketch with a composite hull of carbon fibre, kevlar and glass-reinforced plastic and 802 square metres of sail. She was built by the Tencara yard at Porto Marghera near Venice, the yard behind the Il Moro di Venezia America's Cup boats, and commissioned in 1995. Her pennant number is A 5323 and her home port is La Spezia. For training campaigns the crew grows from seven to around twenty, most of them cadets. The third-year cadets embarked this summer are aspiranti guardiamarina, candidates for the navy's most junior officer rank.
Etna is a different proposition altogether: a command and replenishment ship of roughly 146 m, in service since 1998, with enough accommodation to serve as a floating school for larger groups of junior cadets. Her training cruises usually double as fuel resupply runs to Italian naval bases.
A northern route for the 2026 campaign
Previous Orsa Maggiore campaigns typically ran through the Mediterranean and out to Madeira, the Canaries and the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic coast. This year the ketch, commanded by Commander Carmine Tortoriello, sailed north instead. In late August she reached London, coming up the Thames and passing under Tower Bridge for the first time in her history, and hosted Italy's defence attaché in the United Kingdom, Brigadier General Massimiliano Mongillo, on board. She then left through the English Channel with Bilbao as the next port of call before turning for Lisbon. In earlier years Orsa Maggiore's campaigns have ended in Livorno around 21 or 22 September.
Familiar pattern on the Baltic
The model is the same one Poland uses. The full-rigger Dar Młodzieży of Gdynia Maritime University and the barquentine ORP Iskra of the Polish Naval Academy take cadets to sea every summer, while larger fleet units embark the junior year groups. Orsa Maggiore has raced against the Polish tall ships before: in 2004 she took first place on elapsed time in the Tall Ships' Race from Antwerp via Aalborg and Stavanger to Cuxhaven, an event in which Polish vessels are regular entrants.
Source: Gazeta Morska · Compiled by: Michał Iwański
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