Guido Badano, a 29-year-old officer aboard the glamorous Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria, was asleep in his bunk, relieved of his duties for a while, when two short blasts from the ship’s whistle, signaling an impending turn to the left, jolted him awake. It was shortly after 11 o’clock on the night of July 25, 1956.

Seconds later he heard the sound of fracturing metal. Throwing on his clothes, he grabbed a flashlight and his life jacket and raced to the bridge.

The Andrea Doria, en route from Genoa to New York with 1,134 passengers and 572 crew members, had collided with the smaller European-bound Swedish liner Stockholm in dense fog some 45 miles south of Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. The Stockholm’s bow ripped an enormous hole in the Doria’s starboard side, causing her to list severely.

Eleven hours later, with all the Andrea Doria’s surviving passengers having been rescued by ships responding to an S.O.S., Mr. Badano was sitting in a lifeboat with Capt. Piero Calamai and his other chief officers, watching it disappear into the Atlantic. A Navy destroyer escort picked them up and took them to a pier in Brooklyn.