Conte Biancamano, a bridge in Milan

She was built in Scotland, by William Beardmore at Dalmuir near Glasgow, for the Lloyd Sabaudo of Genoa, and named after Humbert I Whitehand, founder of the House of Savoy. She was launched on 23 April 1925 and left Genoa for New York on her maiden voyage on 20 November that year.

In 1932 the Italian lines were merged into one company, Italia, and her routes began to change: South America, then eastward through Suez for Lloyd Triestino. In 1939, on the run from Genoa to Shanghai, she carried Jewish refugees leaving Germany.

When Italy entered the war in 1940 she was in Panama, at Cristóbal, and she stayed there. In December 1941 the United States seized her. Converted in Philadelphia, she became the troop transport USS Hermitage: North Africa in November 1942, then the Pacific, then Europe after the Normandy landings. By 1946 she had carried 129,695 people — soldiers, wounded, prisoners of war, and refugees, among them Polish children taken on at Bombay.

Returned to Italy in 1947, she was rebuilt at Monfalcone with a new bow and new interiors, by painters and architects including Massimo Campigli, Mario Sironi and Gio Ponti, and went back to New York and the River Plate.

Her last voyage began on 26 March 1960. She had made 364 line crossings and carried 353,836 passengers. She was broken up at La Spezia; before the cutting, her bridge, some first-class cabins and the ballroom were taken down and carried to Milan, where they were rebuilt inside a pavilion of the science museum, completed in 1964. It is the only part of an Italian liner that survives.