They told how they heard a terrible judder, like an earthquake. The whole voyage had been accompanied by loud and eerie vibrations, and “the ship was listing so much that in the morning we couldn’t put our caffè latte down because it would have spilled over.” But that judder was something else: It was more like an explosion, like a bomb. Passengers left the lounges and their cabins, went on deck to find out what was going on. It was late afternoon, and the ship was sailing toward the Brazilian coast, heading for Porto Seguro. It wasn’t a bomb: more like muffled thunder. The ship steamed onward, but its motion had become erratic, like a runaway horse. Now it veered dramatically and slowed down. One man, after hours spent clinging to a piece of wood in the ocean, would later testify that he had clearly seen the propeller and lefthand shaft slide off. Completely. The propeller, they said, had torn a deep gash in the hull: Water gushed in, flooding the engine room, and would soon also fill the hold, since the watertight doors, it seemed, hadn’t worked as they should. 

Someone, they said, had tried to repair the leak with metal panels. In vain. 

They told how the orchestra was ordered to go on playing. Nonstop. 

The ship carried on listing more and more, darkness approached, the sea swelled. 

After the first assurances to passengers, the captain gave orders to stop the engines, to sound the warning siren, and for the wireless operators to send the first SOS. 

The signal for help was answered by several ships, two steamships and even a couple of transatlantic liners that happened to be in the area. They rushed there immediately but were all forced to stop some way off because a large column of white smoke made them fear a disastrous explosion in the furnaces. 

From the deck, the captain with his megaphone was trying ever more desperately to impose calm and was coordinating the rescue operations, giving precedence to women and children. But when night fell—the pitch-black night of a new moon—and the ship’s power supply failed, the situation went completely out of control.

The rescue launches were lowered but the ship was now listing terribly: Many launches dropped straight down, hitting the hull, while others were decrepit, unseaworthy: They let in water so that passengers were forced to bail them out using their hats. Others, under siege, capsized or sank from the excessive load. Many craftsmen or farm workers from the valleys and the plains had never seen the sea before and couldn’t swim. Prayers mingled with cries.

There was panic. Many passengers fell or threw themselves into the sea, drowning. Some, it was said, were overcome by despair. Others, as the local newspapers reported, were eaten alive by sharks.

In the pandemonium there were countless brawls, but also acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. After helping dozens of people, one young man who had been given a life jacket waited for his turn to dive into the water. It was then that he saw an old man who couldn’t swim and had found no place in any boat: He was begging for help. The boy made him wear his life jacket, threw himself into the sea with him, and tried to reach the nearest launch. He swam madly when voices rose ever more insistently from the waves: Sharks! Sharks! He was attacked. A companion managed to pull him onto a launch, but the injuries were devastating. He died soon after.

When the survivors told his story, Argentina was moved by it. In the town where he was born in the province of Entre Ríos, a school was named after him. His father had emigrated from Piedmont, his mother was Argentinian. He was just twenty-one: His name Anacleto Bernardi.

Well before midnight the ship was completely engulfed by the water; its bow rose vertically and with a last deafening, almost animal-like groan, it plunged down to a depth of over fourteen hundred meters. Various accounts confirm that the captain remained on board until the end, ordering those remaining musicians to play the “Marcia Reale.” His body was never found. Certainly, just before the steamship went down, many gunshots were heard, fired, it was said, by officers who, having done as much as they could for the passengers, had decided to avoid the torment of drowning.

Several launches managed to reach the nearby ships and, together with those from other ships that had come to help, were able to save many hundreds of people.

The rescue of those few survivors who tried as best as they could to stay afloat continued late into the night. When, before dawn, other Brazilian steamships reached the scene of the disaster, they found no one else alive. 

That ship, over four hundred and fifty feet long, had been the pride of the merchant navy at the turn of the twentieth century, the most prestigious ocean liner in the Italian fleet, and had transported such celebrities as Arturo Toscanini, Luigi Pirandello, and Carlos Gardel, a legend in the history of Argentine tango. But those times had passed some while before. There had been a world war in the meantime, and wear and tear, neglect, and lack of maintenance had done the rest. Now, instead, the ship was known as la balaìna, the ballerina, due to the way it pitched and rolled. When it left on its final voyage, despite the misgivings of its own captain, it had more than twelve hundred passengers on board, mainly migrants from Piedmont, Liguria, and the Veneto. But also from the Marche, Basilicata, Calabria.

According to the figures provided by the Italian authorities at the time, just over three hundred people died in the disaster. Most of them, it was said, were members of the crew; but the South American newspapers reported a much larger figure, more than double, including stowaways, several dozen Syrian emigrants, and farm laborers traveling to South America from the Italian countryside for the winter season.

Played down or covered up by the fascist authorities, that shipwreck was the Italian Titanic.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the story of that ship that carried the name of the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III, who herself was destined to meet a tragic death several years later at Buchenwald concentration camp, toward the end of another terrible war. The SS Principessa Mafalda.

That story was told in my family.

It was told in my barrio, my neighborhood.

It was sung about in the popular songs of migrants, on both sides of the ocean: “From Italy Mafalda set sail with a thousand and more aboard . . . Fathers and mothers clung to their children who vanished among the waves.”

My grandparents and their only son, Mario, the young man who would become my father, had bought their ticket for that long crossing, for that ship that set sail from the port of Genoa on October 11, 1927, bound for Buenos Aires.

But they didn’t take it. 

Hard as they tried, they couldn’t sell what they owned in time. In the end, reluctantly, the Bergoglio family was forced to exchange their ticket, to delay their departure for Argentina.

That is why I’m here now.

You can’t imagine how many times I have found myself thanking Divine Providence.

From the book HOPE by Pope Francis with Carlo Musso, translated by Richard Dixon. Copyright © 2025 by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, citta del Vaticano; Copyright © 2025 by Mondadori Libri S.p.A.; English translation copyright © 2025 by Penguin Random House LLC. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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