MARCONIS YACHT

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30144, 30 May 1963, Page 20

MARCONIS YACHT

Memorial To Scientist (By a Reuter Correspondent) ROME.

The yacht Elettra, Marconi’s floating laboratory, has been raised from the sea bed and may find a last, resting place on an artificial lake in a modern garden suburb of Rome. The yacht, from which the Italian inventor conducted some of his most famous wireless experiments in the 1920's and 1930’5, is now little more than a battered, rusty hulk. It is being repaired and made shipshape again in a Trieste shipyard. The Germans seized it during World War II and converted it into a gunboat. An allied torpedo sent it to the bottom off the Dalmatian coast, in IM4. There it lay, until recently. Under an agreement between the Italian and Jugoslav governments, the Jugoslav’s raised it from the sea bed, towed it to Trieste and handed it over to the Italians. The Italian authorities wish to put it on permanent exhibition, as a monument of historic and national importance. The final decision has not yet been taken as to where this will be, but the likelihood is that it will be on view in the EUR suburb of Rome. This is an area, between Rome and the sea. which Mussolini started to build as the site for a world exhibition. Then war intervened and in the last few years it has been developed as a residential garden suburb. The Italians are fortunate in having the Elettra’s scientific equipment still intact. When the Germans were about to adapt it as a gunboat during World War H. a Trieste Professor removed the equipment from under their noses and hid it in 24 packing cases in one of the town’s air raid shelters.

The Elettra was built before World War I for an Austrian Archduke. Taken by the British as war booty, Marconi later bought it from the British Government and named it after his daughter.