Giuseppe Garibaldi cruisers: export success and submarine risk

The class reached Argentina, Japan, and Spain as well as the Italian Navy, making it an unusually successful export product. The Spanish-American War supplied a harsher test: Spain's four armoured cruisers and two destroyers were all lost at Santiago de Cuba against an American force centred on four battleships. Buyers could receive strikingly different main-battery arrangements, a flexibility that complicated ammunition and maintenance planning. In the Adriatic campaign, Giuseppe Garibaldi's loss to U-4 and the later caution shown with the survivors underline the danger of exposing such ships to submarines.