From the 1880s to 1910s, the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) built or purchased twenty protected cruisers; the earliest vessels were either built or designed in Britain, though later vessels were constructed in Italy, to Italian designs. Several of these cruisers were ground-breaking warships: Dogali was the first major warship equipped with triple-expansion engines and Piemonte was the first warship armed entirely with quick-firing guns. The first two designs, Giovanni Bausan and the Etna class, were armed with large-caliber guns and marked a brief experimentation with the Jeune École in the 1880s, which represented a shift away from expensive battleships in favor of cheaper vessels that could theoretically destroy battleships easily. Italian naval strategists quickly discarded the con