Guglielmo Marconi at speed
Galileo Galilei at Pago Pago
Galileo Galilei at the Panama Canal
Guglielmo Marconi at Port Said
With the launch of the new ships GALILEO GALILEI and GUGLIELMO MARCONI, LLOYD TRIESTINO could now offer an express service to AUSTRALIA with the sister ships taken just over three weeks for the trip from Genova to Sydney, both would travel via the Suez Canal for both legs of the voyage, for the first 7/8 years they were profitable and regarded as two of the best ships on the Australian route, they became popular for the hotel services on board with excellent cuisine and very comfortable passenger facilities and they were of course very fast liners, the GALILEO reached 27.4 knots as maximum speed and the MARCONI, 27 knots. With the arrival of the 70's a decline in passenger numbers and the oil crisis doomed not just the LLOYD TRIESTINO twins but passenger liners in general, in an attempt to secure more passengers after 1972 both ships would often return home from Australia via the Panama and Caribbean, in 1973 both ships embarked on epic around the world voyages that would take about 80 days with the ships calling at Malta, Tenerife, Cape Town, Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Auckland, Noumea, Suva, Tahiti, Acapulco, Balboa, Cristobal, Curacao, Lisbon, Malaga and Piraeus before returning home to Genoa via Messina and Naples with the ships steaming about 31.000 nautical miles. All photos from my private collection
I travelled from Sydney to Genova via Suez in early 1967. Later that year Suez closed, and presumably airlines jumped in with competitive prices, because flying became the norm.
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