The sea planes

Seaplane S.M 55 X
Engine Asso 750
Instruments

The communications

Communications network
Radio cabin
Manuals
Donath lamp

The ships

Ship Alice
Submarine Domenico Millelire
Submarine Balilla

The airplanes in support

Airplane I-AAXZ

The equipment

Clothing
The Belloni bag

Launched on 30 August 1924 with the name Dentice, registered with matriculation 90 at the Maritime Compartment of Rome.

Made at the shipyard of the Deutsche Werft in Hamburg and destined for the Italian Society of Fisheries and Subproducts. It was part of a group of twenty-four ocean pyropes, ordered in the first post-war period from Italy to five different German shipyards, as reparation for war damages.

Purchased by the Royal Navy, on 1 November 1931 it was incorporated into the subsidiary navy of the Royal Navy. Transformed into a gunship and a minesweeper look and renamed Pellegrino Matteucci (Italian explorer who died in 1881), he entered service on 1 February 1933.

Together with his sister Giuseppe Biglieri, he participated in the operations of support for the Decennial Aerial Cruise as a look-out and a radio-beacon in the North Atlantic.

In September 1938 it was reclassified as coastal transport, resulting in the 1940 (at the outbreak of hostilities) framed in the Group Departmental Auxiliary Ships of the Maritime Military Department of the High Tyrrhenian Sea. At dawn on May 21st 1941 the Matteucci, sailing from Brindisi to Patras, passed off the island of Santa Maura (today Leucade) where he hit a mine laid in the night by the British poundman Abdiel, exploding and sinking in very little one and a half miles north-northwest of Cape Dukato.

Intervened in the area, during the search for the castaways, the destroyer Carlo Mirabello hit the mine with a bow, sinking in a few hours. The survivors, two of whom belonged to Matteucci's crew, were recovered from Gradisca; two others swim to the coast, bringing four survivors to the sinking of the Matteucci.