Aldo Fraccaroli

Aldo Fraccaroli (17 September 1919 – 23 March 2010) was an Italian naval historian and photographer who specialized in 20th-century Italian naval history. He served in the (Royal Italian Navy) during World War II and briefly in the during the 1950s.

Life Born in Milan, Fraccaroli was the son of the author, journalist and screenwriter Arnaldo Fraccaroli, and Lisetta Camerino. He began contributing articles and reviews to the newspaper among other general interest publications and the French naval annual in 1937. The following year his photographs from the 5 May 1938 naval parade in the Gulf of Naples that was observed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were published by the naval annual Jane's Fighting Ships.

Fraccaroli joined the reserve component and was commissioned as a Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant after the start of World War II. After assignments in Venice and Greece, he was transferred to the Naval Ministry in Rome in 1942. He was in the city when the Italians signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies on 8 September and was able to rescue all of his negatives that were in storage at the Navy's Photographic Service. Dismissed from service afterwards, he returned to Milan where he finished his degree in jurisprudence. He was recalled to service in April 1945, but was again released about a year later.

In the late 1960s, he published Italian Warships of World War I and Italian Warships of World War II with Ian Allan Publishing because no Italian publisher was interested in the subject and Ian Allan was publishing a series on all the navies involved in the world wars. Fraccaroli wrote the Italian sections of the 1860–1905 and 1905–1921 volumes of Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships during the 1970s and 1980s and began contributing articles to both Warship and Warship International. He also wrote articles for the Italian military history journal.