Commissioned into service in the Italian Regia Marina ("Royal Navy") in 1915, she served in World War I, participating in the Adriatic campaign.

Francesco Nullo, under the command of Capitano di corvetta (Corvette captain) Catellani,[2] had been in commission for only a little over three weeks when Italy declared war.

[3] On 3 May 1916 Francesco Nullo, under the command of Luigi Biancheri, a future admiral, got underway with her sister ship Giuseppe Missori and the scout cruisers Cesare Rossarol and Guglielmo Pepe to provide distant support to the destroyers Fuciliere and Zeffiro as they laid a minefield[4] in the Adriatic Sea off Šibenik (known to the Italians as Sebenico) on the coast of Austria-Hungary.

[5] On 12 June 1916, escorted by Cesare Rossarol and Guglielmo Pepe as far as the Austro-Hungarian defensive barrage, Francesco Nullo and Giuseppe Missori supported Fuciliere, Zeffiro, the destroyer Alpino, and the coastal torpedo boats 30 PN and 46 PN as they forced the port of Poreč on the western side of Istria, a peninsula on Austria-Hungary's coast, at dawn.

[2] On 1–2 November 1916, Francesco Nullo, Giuseppe Missori, Guglielmo Pepe, and the scout cruiser Alessandro Poerio made ready to provide possible support to an incursion by MAS motor torpedo boats into the Fažana Channel on the southwest coast of Istria.

[6] Before Italy entered World War I, it had made a pact with the Allies, the Treaty of London of 1915, in which it was promised all of the Austrian Littoral, but not the city of Fiume (known in Croatian as Rijeka).

The Bloody Christmas fighting ended on 29 December 1920 in D'Annunzio's defeat and the establishment of the Free State of Fiume.

With the Fiume affair at an end, Francesco Nullo surrendered to Italian forces and returned to Regia Marina control.

[12] On 23 December 1940, while steaming from Benghazi toward Tripoli, Fratelli Cairoli struck a mine laid on 9 November by the British Royal Navy submarine HMS Rorqual off Misrata, Libya, and sank within a few minutes.