The Principessa Mafalda can now be seen from every side. In The ship in 3D you can turn the ship, come close to the bow, look down from above, go below the waterline and open up the hull.
Where the shape comes from
We have not found a technical plan of the ship, and period photographs almost always show her from the same angle: side-on, leaving Genoa or lying in port. So the starting point is a Lloyd Italiano postcard of the ship in profile. It gave the proportions of the hull, the height of the superstructure and the position of the two funnels, the masts and the row of lifeboats.
The dimensions come from Eugene W. Smith’s Passenger Ships of the World: 485 by 58 feet, or 147.8 by 17.7 metres. The proportion the postcard suggested was already almost exactly that.
Some things are approximate, and the page says which: the funnel colours, the number of lifeboats, the deck details.
Six points, six passages from the book
Six numbered points open passages from the book: the 1908 hull, the bridge, the funnels of the postcards, the lifeboats, third class and the port shaft, which broke at a quarter past five on the afternoon of 25 October 1927. That last one is under water, and the camera goes down to it.
Third class is an illustration
At point 5 the hull opens to show dormitories with iron bunks and a dining room with tables and benches. It is not a document. The plan we found, from a Lloyd brochure of around 1909, shows only the luxury, first and second classes. Third class does not appear: the company did not sell the hold. The cutaway uses only what the company’s advertisement and the passengers described, and it is marked as an illustration.
If you have a general arrangement plan of the ship, or any photograph of third class on board, get in touch. It is the missing piece.
The names in the background
Behind the ship, the 310 names on the list of victims rise slowly — the same names as in the In memoriam section. They are as they were copied, with the spellings of whoever first wrote them down. The list is a compilation of undeclared origin, and the most often cited death toll is 314; the difference is explained in The numbers.
The scene also has music and the sound of the sea, both very low. Sound starts at the first click and can be switched off in the corner of the screen.
This note is part of the research for the book Terceira Classe (Third Class), about Italian emigration to Brazil and the sinking of the Principessa Mafalda in 1927.