In the 1861, the frigate “Terribile” was the first ironclad of the emerging Italian Navy and her history is interesting for both technical point of view and historical events. In fact, as the industrial revolution unfolded in the 19th century, the age of wooden hulled sailing ships gave way to that of steam powered iron ships. Moreover, due to the development of armament and armour, many changes took place in nearly every aspect of warship: design, operation and tactics. At the same time, in 1850 was just introduced the concept of dynamic stability, whereas up until the date the ship stability was essentially based upon Archimedes and Bouguer theories. Today, the availability of bibliography and the original lines plan of “Terribile” has enabled both the reconstruction of the ship design developments and the evaluation of the main ship characteristics, adopting the computational tools available nowadays. The obtained results are compared with original data, together with a prediction of the ship statical stability.