[1][2] Named after the famous Italian inventor and artist Leonardo da Vinci, the ship featured numerous technological innovations, including provisions for conversion to run on nuclear power.

[8] In 1949 the company received subsidies from the Italian government to build two new liners of approximately 30,000 gross register tons for the transatlantic service to New York City.

But the Andrea Doria sank after just three years of service on 25 July 1956 after colliding with the Swedish American Line ship MS Stockholm.

Like the Andrea Doria and Cristoforo Colombo, the Leonardo da Vinci proved to be a tender ship (prone to instability) in rough weather.But the Leonardo da Vinci's stability problem was greater because of her larger size, and as a result 3000 metric tons of iron were fitted along her bottom to improve stability.

The ship was used on one-night cruises from Miami to Nassau, Bahamas, but proved unnecessarily large and too expensive to operate on a service of that kind.

But she was 19 m (62.34 ft) longer, had a larger forward and aft superstructure, and a slightly different-shaped funnel that included a smoke deflector fin.

[2] Visually one of the most nicely-balanced ships of that (or perhaps any) era, she originally had an identical livery to that used in the Andrea Doria and Cristoforo Colombo, with a black hull with a longitudinal thin white band painted two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the black-painted area.

[2] Because of the provisions made for conversion to run on nuclear power, the Leonardo da Vinci had a somewhat unusual interior layout.

This made it necessary to locate the dining rooms and galleys one deck higher than usual, and separated from the ship's main working passage.

No passenger corridors passed through the area reserved for a reactor, which meant the forward and rear passenger-accessible sections on the lowest decks were entirely separated from each other.