"Loreley" left Danzig on 31 July 1860 and "Ida" followed on 9 August; the two ships rendezvoused off Naples, then in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, on 31 August. Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand had forced King Francis II to flee to Gaeta, so "Loreley" embarked the Prussian and Austrian ambassadors, along with a pair of representatives from the Papal States, and carried them to Gaeta. She then returned to Naples, where she and "Ida" embarked civilians from the German states fleeing the fighting there. A senior Sicilian officer was also evacuated aboard "Ida", which drew protests from the Kingdom of Sardinia. "Loreley" was sent first to Greece in October to show the flag in Piraeus, leaving "Ida" in Italian waters. From there, she directed to visit the Ottoman Empire and enter the Black Sea. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris that had ended the Crimean War in 1856, Prussia and the other European Great Powers (excluding the Russian Empire) were permitted to station warships in the mouth of the Danube at Sulina. "Loreley" was the first Prussian warship to do so. She returned to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, in mid-June 1861 to bring the Prussian ambassador to visit the new Sultan Abdülaziz. The ship's executive officer, "LzS" Otto Livonius, took command of the ship when Kuhn was recalled to Prussia to take command of the gunboat flotilla; "Loreley" then cruised to Mount Athos. She remained in the Mediterranean for another year, which passed uneventfully, before returning to Prussia, being decommissioned at Dänholm in August 1862.