Pugliese.

This is coolbert:

"There may be some people who underestimate Italy as a country of great thinkers, but not the GRU. The GRU know that the Italians have very good brains, the brains of great inventors. Few people realize that before the Second World War Italy's technology was at an incredibly high level. The Italians were not especially brilliant in battle, and that obscured the extent of Italian achievement in military technology." - - Suvorov.

NOT IN ALL CASES THE ITALIAN SUCH GENIUS!

Thanks to the tip and idea from the War is Boring Internet web site. GRU = Soviet Military Intelligence.

Not all Italian military technology in that period prior to WW2 such a marked success. Consider the Pugliese Torpedo Defense System [TDS].

"Roma and its sisters (Littorio and Vittorio Veneto) were built with an experimental underwater protection system designed by Italian naval architect Umberto Pugliese. This system proved disastrous in practice; Roma’s sisters repeatedly suffered heavy damage from torpedo attacks". 

"The Pugliese design filled the volume of the TDS [Torpedo Defense System] with a large cylinder, which was in turn filled with closed tubes . . . Pugliese’s theory was that the torpedo would expend its energy crushing the cylinder.  In practice the design failed miserably.  Following the path of least resistance, the blast traveled around the cylinder and concentrated itself against the weakest point of the complex structure supporting the cylinder:  the concave holding bulkhead."

"This bulkhead acted much like a dam mistakenly built bowing downstream, rather than upstream against the current.  This concave surface was structurally the weakest possible arrangement for containing the force of an explosion, and to make matters worse, the workmanship proved tragically defective."

"Pugliese’s design also consumed tremendous volume, and foreshortened the depth of the armored belt, making the ships so fitted more vulnerable to shell hits below the waterline.  Once again, practical experience proved that not every innovation represented an improvement."

THE PUGLIESE SYSTEM OF TORPEDO DEFENSE EXACERBATING RATHER THAN AMELIORATING A DANGEROUS CONDITION. CAPITAL WARSHIPS EQUIPPED WITH THE PUGLIESE TDS THAT MUCH MORE SUSCEPTIBLE TO DAMAGE FROM TORPEDO ATTACK OR UNDERWATER SHELL HITS!!

coolbert.