″Amerigo Vespucci″ in Lisbon
It can be visited this Friday (from 12:00 to 22:00) and Saturday (from 12:00 to 18:00), at the Rocha Conde de Óbidos pier, in Lisbon, the Italian training ship Amerigo Vespucci, whose name honors the great 16th century navigator who was the first to realize that the important lands (also by Italian Christopher Columbus) and Pedro Álvares Cabral are not part of Asia, but a new continent. And that’s why it’s called America.
The sailors on board know well the history of the compatriot who sailed in the service of the crowns of Spain and Portugal and who is known around here as Amerigo Vespucci. With a crew of 264 soldiers, the Amerigo Vespucci it has 400 men and women on board in the summer, as cadets and personnel from the naval academy arrive for training. Built almost a century ago, she is a sailing ship with an engine of admirable aesthetics and the top of her mainmast is 54 meters above the waterline.
When setting sail from Portugal, leaving at the mouth of the Tagus, the Italian Navy, scheduled to arrive in Casablanca on August 6th. Before docking in Lisbon, which he last visited three years ago, the Amerigo Vespucci made stops in Tunis and Algiers, to later leave the Mediterranean Sea and enter the Atlantic Ocean.
A visit to the ship will also serve to remember the great Italian maritime tradition for half of the Venetians and Genoese (Italian unity only happened in the second of the 19th century). Vespucci, curiously, was a Florentine. Portugal with Italians in its 16th century discoveries and the characteristics of the Portuguese Navy and founded in the 14th century, during the reign of D. Dinis, by Manuel Pessanha, a Genoese whose name of origin must have Emanuelegno.