Giovanni Bettolo (Genoa, 25 May 1846 – Rome, 7 April 1916) was an Italian admiral, politician and deputy of the Kingdom of Italy who served three times as Minister of the Navy.

Giovanni entered the Regia Marina as an ensign in 1863 and was decorated for valour at the battle of Lissa for his conduct on the frigate Principe Umberto.

[6][7][8] He came to the attention of Navy Minister Benedetto Brin, an energetic moderniser, who involved him in solving a range of technical issues faced by the Italian navy, from methods of testing the strength of armour plating to the development of a device to calculate target distance between two moving ships in order to make gunfire more accurate.

[6] In 1895, commanding the ironclad Re Umberto, Bettolo joined a number of Italian ships at the ceremony for the opening of the Kiel Canal.

[12] During the international intervention in Crete Bettolo took over from Felice Napoleone Canevaro in 1898 as the admiral in charge of the Italian naval forces operating near the island.

During his first term as minister, Bettolo had the naval engineer Vittorio Cuniberti develop plans for Italy’s Regina Elena-class battleships.

[17] As soon as Bettolo returned to the Ministry of the Navy for his second term in April 1903, the editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, Enrico Ferri, started a ferocious campaign against him, claiming that he had increased the salary of the President of the Superior Council of the Navy in order to induce him to approve a contract for the supply of naval armour in the amount of 20 million lire with the Terni steelworks, branding him a corrupt profiteer.

[23]: 174  Above all, Bettolo’s bill was accused of being an effort to “salvage old hulks” (“salvataggio delle vecchie carcasse”) - i.e. unviable and moribund navigation companies.

[27] He also clashed in the chamber with his successor as Navy Minister, Pasquale Leonardi Cattolica, over the delays and inefficiencies of the battleship building programme.