They were also equipped with four torpedo tubes. The ships were protected by an armored belt that was thick amidships and reduced to at the bow and stern. The upper strake of armor was also 15 cm thick and protected just the middle of the ship, up to the height of the upper deck. The curved armored deck was 3.7 cm thick. The conning tower armor was also 15 cm thick and each 15.2 cm gun was protected by a gun shield. "Vettor Pisani" was the flagship of Rear Admiral Candiani, commander of the Cruising Squadron dispatched to China in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. She arrived at La Spezia in early 1902, but only remained in Italian waters for a year before returning to the Far East for another year-long cruise. "Carlo Alberto" acted as the royal yacht for King Victor Emmanuel III when he attended the coronation ceremony for King Edward VII of the United Kingdom in 1902. Victor Emmanuel invited Guglielmo Marconi to accompany him and conduct radio experiments en route. When the coronation was delayed by Edward's illness, the ship took Victor Emmanuel to meetings with Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in Kronstadt. She then ferried Marconi across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia for experiments transmitting radio messages across the ocean. After 15 December, when Marconi successfully transmitted messages from Canada to England, "Carlo Alberto" was sent to Venezuelan waters during the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–03, when an international force of British, German, and Italian warships blockaded Venezuela over the country's refusal to pay foreign debts. From 1907 to 1910 she served as a gunnery and torpedo training ship. Both ships participated in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12. "Vettor Pisani" supported operations in the Adriatic and Aegean Seas and in the Dardanelles while "Carlo Alberto" took part in the assaults on Tripoli and Zuara and thereafter provided gunfire support to Italian forces in North Africa. Obsolescent by the beginning of World War I, neither ship was very active during the war. "Vettor Pisani" spent the war in the Adriatic and participated in an abortive attempt in mid-1915 to bombard a rail line near Ragusa Vecchia on the Dalmatian coast. An Austro-Hungarian submarine, "U-4", intercepted the Italian ships and sank the armored cruiser . "Vettor Pisani" subsequently became a repair ship in 1916 and was stricken from the Navy List on 2 January 1920.