The ANNOTICO Report

Yes, the "Enrico Toti", the first Italian Submarine to be built after WWII in 1968, was being "retired" to the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan from it's former base in Augusta, Sicily, near Syracuse.

The 150-foot-long, 536-ton Toti's mission was to hunt out and destroy Russian nuclear missile launchers. But the lifting of the Iron Curtain together with rapid technological made  it obsolete.

 The Toti sailed up the Adriatic, and then took to fresh water, navigating along the Po, Italy's longest river, until it arrived in Cremona, the closest navigable point to Milan. The 58-mile overland trip from Cremona ended up on the streets of Milan. What a sight that must have been!!

A Submarine Navigates the Streets of Milan

The New York Times
By Elisabetta Povoledo
August 14, 2005
MILAN, Aug. 13 - When the giant submarine came lumbering down the lonely strip of highway early Friday headed for its new home in a Milan museum, hundreds of mobile phones were raised in unison to capture images of the spectacle.
The wait had been long. The 150-foot-long Enrico Toti was supposed to make the 58-mile trip to the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology here from Cremona four years ago, but the project was grounded by financial and technical setbacks.
"It's gotten a lot of press, and it is an exceptional occasion," said Stefano Galliazzo, 34, a graphic designer, who ignored a midnight chill to stand by the highway and watch the Toti creep toward the city. He looked at the hundreds of spectators flanking the road. "I'm sure people came just so they could say 'I was there,' " he said.
The early-morning maneuvers had a distinctly military feel. Perched on a 240-wheel flatbed truck, the Toti was preceded by the low rumbling of a motorcade of military trucks, police motorcycles and cars with flashing lights. Men in camouflage gear milled about, looking busy.
Farther up the highway, closer to the city, the second brigade of the Genio Pontieri, the army's bridge engineers, laid the base of a movable bridge built to provide extra support to the road as the truck passed over an underground river. Soldiers raised floodlights from trailers marked KFOR, the NATO-led security force in Kosovo, where the military division helping transport the submarine had worked building bridges.
"Why don't you get out of the way," barked Giovanni De Paoli, 56, to a carful of local residents who had parked on the highway to get a better look. Mr. De Paoli heads the engineering department at Fagioli, the heavy-lift transport company whose task it has been to get the Toti from Cremona's port to the Milanese museum. "We've done much bigger, much heavier transports," he said. What was exceptional in this case was the route - passing through the centuries-old streets of Italy's second largest city.
The most delicate phase is expected to be the final four miles - to be traveled early Sunday - where sidewalks, lampposts, flowerbeds and electrical wires for trams, buses and trains have been temporarily removed from the streets along which the sub will crawl at a speed of less than two miles an hour.
The Toti took to sea in 1968, the first Italian submarine to be built after World War II. Its mission was to hunt out and destroy Russian nuclear missile launchers. But the lifting of the Iron Curtain together with rapid technological change effectively grounded the vessel, and in 2001 the Italian Navy bequeathed it to the museum, which already had an important transportation collection.
That year, the Toti sailed up the Adriatic, and then took to fresh water, navigating along the Po, Italy's longest river, until it arrived in Cremona. A planned two-month hiatus in the port turned into a four-year soap opera as engineers and local lawmakers fretted that the costs and technical difficulties of moving the cumbersome 536-ton craft would be too much to bear.
The impasse was overcome last year when sponsors, including the military contractor Finmeccanica and Telecom Italia, were found to supply the $3 million to $3.7 million price tag. For the museum, whose logo is emblazoned across the Toti's side, the media flurry around the transfer has been a publicity boon.
"Toti represents a jewel of Italian industrial mechanics and there can be no better place for it than a museum that bears the name of Leonardo da Vinci," said Michele Perini, the museum's president.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14
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