Conceived and built to provide assistance to the Italian overseas colonies, the Regia Nave Puglia belonged to the Regioni-class torpedo rams of the Royal Italian Navy. She is the first ever naval vessel to have been laid and launched at the Taranto Naval Arsenal, which was inaugurated by King Umberto I in 1889. While in commission, the Puglia (named after Apulia, the region to which Taranto belongs) travelled extensively around the world in order to fly the ensign of the recently unified Italy on distant seas, completing two full circumnavigations and calling at hundreds of ports on all continents. The history of this ship and her crews has been meticulously de-scribed thanks to the sources studied. Among these are documents preserved in the archives of the Italian Navy in Rome (USMM, Ufficio Storico Marina Militare), in the archives of the Vittoriale degli Italiani (AdV, the museum which houses the remains of the ship), not to mention an unpublished logbook compiled by a naval officer named Galeazzo Sommi Picenardi (ASP) who was involved in the naval operations in the Read Sea. From all these origi-nal and largely unpublished papers emerge unknown aspects of the life on board, the encounters at sea, the inter-national relations, as well as the war-time events that the Regia Nave Puglia witnessed in the period that saw her in commission (1901-1923): from the aftermath of the Boxer rebellion in China to the First World War; from the Italian-Ottoman war (1911-1912) to the unrest that tormented the region of Dalmatia in the post-war period, to mention but a few.