Italian destroyer Quintino Sella

Quintino Sella was the lead ship of her class of four destroyers built for the Regia Marina (Royal Italian Navy) in the 1920s. Completed in 1926, she served in World War II.

Design and description
The Sella-class destroyers were enlarged and improved versions of the preceding Palestro-class destroyer and Curtatone-class destroyeres. They had an overall length of 84.9 m, a beam of 8.6 m and a mean draft of 2.7 m. They displaced 970 t at standard load, and 1480 t at deep load. Their complement was 8–9 officers and 144 enlisted men.

The Sellas were powered by two Parsons geared steam turbines, each driving one propeller shaft using steam supplied by three Thornycroft boilers. The turbines were rated at 36000 shp for a speed of 33 kn in service, although Quintino Sella reached a speed of 37.3 kn from 35090 shp during her sea trials while lightly loaded. The ships carried enough fuel oil to give them a range of 1800 nmi at a speed of 14 kn.

Their main battery consisted of four 120 mm guns in one twin-gun turret aft of the superstructure and one single-gun turret forward of it. Anti-aircraft (AA) defense for the Sella-class ships was provided by a pair of 40 mm AA guns in single mounts amidships and a pair of 13.2 mm machine guns. They were equipped with four 533 mm torpedo tubes in two twin mounts amidships. The Sellas could also carry 32 mines.

Construction and career
Quintino Sella was laid down by Pattinson at their Naples shipyard on 12 October 1922, launched on 25 April 1925 and commissioned on 25 March 1926.

Fate
In the afternoon of 11 September 1943 during Operation Achse, at 4:50 p.m., S 54 stopped the Italian steamer Pontinia (715 GRT) about 30 nm south of Venice and she was taken as a prize. At 5:45 p.m., the approaching Quintino Sella, which was actually on her way to Taranto to surrender to the British, was sunk with two torpedoes from the Kriegsmarine S-boats S 54 under tactical leader Oberleutnant zur See Klaus-Degenhard Schmidt and S 61 under Oberleutnant zur See Axel von Gernet. The captain Corrado Cini, seriously wounded (he later had to suffer the amputation of a leg), and most of the survivors were rescued by order of Schmidt and brought to Pontinia and Leopardi, others were rescued later by Italian fishing boats. A total of 27 crew members of the ship perished, but also many of the 300 civilians from Venice, which Quintino Sella had on board.

In 1956, an unsuccessful attempt was made to recover the ship. The wreck was again identified in 1972, in good condition, and was partially dismantled to recover metals.