Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 10, No 9
Articles in this issue
- Review of Abbot Emilio Silvestri's illustrated monograph L'Istria, printed at Vicenza after ten years of study, which fixes the peninsula's natural frontiers, describes the Carso and its caves (S. Canziano, Corniale, S. Servolo) and tabulates its Italian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene and German population. The Touring uses the book to defend the place-names on its own Istria map and to call for a short Italian pocket guide to the region.
- Francesco Radi's account, written for the Rivista, of the tour he and Pietro Morichini made round Spain — some 1,900 km by bicycle from Barcelona through Saragossa, Madrid, Toledo, Cordova, Seville, Cadiz, Malaga, Granada, Murcia and Valencia — prefaced by the Rome consulate's banquet in their honour at Tivoli under capo console Brunialti. He rates the road surfaces, the venta, posada and fonda, the Guardia Civil's suppression of brigandage, and the embryonic state of Spanish cycling outside Barcelona.
- The standing department of Touring outings and rallies, reporting meets at Pieve di Cadore, Brescia, Agnone and Vercelli and announcing those at Montecatini, Pinerolo and Vittorio, followed by short notices from consulates across Italy.
- Report of the cycling rally of 14-15 August organised by the newly founded Club Ciclistico Cadorino, run by vice-president Gerolamo Zivelonghi and secretary Augusto Zuliani after Dr Arturo Coletti withdrew; about 300 riders paraded through Piazza Tiziano and Ottone Brentari spoke for the Touring's 40,000 members. Gold medals went to Cologna Veneta (furthest), Belluno (largest) and Montebelluna (most kilometres), and Bice Podrecca of Cividale took the ladies' prize.
- First news, received while the issue was on press, of the Brescia meeting and congress of 28-29 August chaired by Hon. Bonardi, with papers by Dr Favari on improving hotels, Ing. Tedeschi on road maintenance, avv. Tarenzi on the movable bicycle plate and tax, and Col. Chiaria on volunteer cyclists. An outing on Lake Iseo took in the Gregorini foundry at Castro.
- Notice that the next issue will carry the account by Prof. Corio and rag. Mercanti, both Touring consuls, of their Turin-Paris and Brescia-Paris rides.
- The touring rally at Agnone on 15 August, at which the consular banner presented by cav. Roberto Gandolfi was blessed by the priest Giovanni Cusico and handed to consul Tirone by cav. Trasatti of Rome. Gold medals went to the Rome squad as furthest travelled and to Naples as the most numerous with ten riders.
- The rally of 31 July promoted by the Unione Sportiva Vercellese for the feast of S. Eusebio drew close to a thousand riders from some forty Italian and Swiss towns, including a Trento delegation that presented a mosaic of Trento's Dante monument. The following day the Trentino cyclists rode to the ossuary at Palestro.
- Full programme of the cyclo-automobile rally at the Bagni di Montecatini on 7-9 September, with Mario Giuliani, Touring consul, chairing the executive committee. It covers visits to the Tettuccio, Tamerici and Leopoldine spas, the Garzoni garden at Collodi and the Giusti and Parlanti grottoes at Monsummano; entry L. 9.
- Announcement of the touring demonstration of 11 September marking the tenth anniversary of the local Veloce Club and the unveiling of its banner, with numerous prizes.
- Announcement of the sectional touring rally at Vittorio (Treviso) on 11 September under Touring patronage, signed by the mayor avv. Giovanni Wassermann and consul Giuseppe Eugerio, including the blessing of the Club Sportivo's gonfalon and a run to the Negrisiola lakes.
- Round-up of new and reconstituted clubs joining the Touring: the Routier Italiano founded at Bologna (membership requires 100 km in five hours without a stop), a cyclists' circle at Minerbe, the Sporting Club Forza e Vigore at Nizza Monferrato, the Club Ciclistico Cadorino formally inaugurated at Pieve di Cadore, the Società ciclisti di Trinità and the Nicola Mameli club at Voltri.
- The magazine's standing photography department, given over this month to Prof. Rodolfo Namias's report on the French photographic congress at Nancy.
- Prof. Rodolfo Namias describes the congress of the Union nationale des sociétés photographiques held at Nancy on 18-20 July and hosted by the Société Lorraine de Photographie under avv. Riston. He summarises papers by Wallon on telephoto and simple soft-focus lenses, the Lumière brothers on their new three-colour plate, Blondlot on N-rays, Monpillard on ultraviolet screens and Balagny on acid amidol, and urges the Touring to run lantern-slide evenings in Italy.
- Standing department on promoting foreign tourist traffic to Italy, carrying Bertolini's address on the Touring's part in it and news of the Lake Orta committee.
- Text of cav. Lorenzo Bertolini's address to the hoteliers' association, reprinted from the Rivista degli alberghi, praising Bertarelli's regional guides and Brentari's railway guides and the pamphlet Il Touring agli albergatori. He argues that it is the inns of small towns and alpine valleys, not the luxury hotels, that must be improved if foreigners are to stay.
- The Lake Orta committee of the national association for foreign tourist traffic constituted itself in Orta town hall under mayor Ragazzoni, electing avv. cav. Eugenio Canetta Rossi Palermo president; it is the largest of the lake committees formed at the Touring's prompting. A Milan delegation and a lecture by Dr Ettore Candiani were planned for 11 September.
- Dr Guglielmo Grifi of Passignano describes how the drainage emissary rid Lake Trasimeno of malaria and transformed its lakeside villages, and welcomes the new "La Trasimeno" navigation company subscribed by the local people and the "La Salute" bathing establishment beside Passignano station.
- The chemists' college of Rome passed a formal protest against the English Baedeker's statement that Italian medicines are dear and of the poorest quality and that English and German pharmacies are preferable, threatening legal action. The Rivista replies that the real remedy is for Italians to produce accurate guides of their own.
- Rebuttal of an article by one François Crastre in the Paris review Le Monde Moderne claiming that every Italian hotel is dirty and dear and every street full of beggars, prefaced by the anecdote of the foreigner who found a fly in his wine and concluded that it always rains in Italy.
- Standing department on hotels and hotel-keepers, this month reviewing the season at spas and alpine resorts and describing the new Palace Hotel des Dolomites.
- The persistent heat, ruinous for the countryside, filled Italy's bathing establishments and alpine resorts, with visitors turned away daily; the writer notes real improvements even in modest hotels, Italian families holidaying at home instead of abroad, and fresh capital subscribed for new hotels, tramways and funiculars.
- Description of the alpine hotel inaugurated on 10 July in the Boite valley between Borca and San Vito, built in stone by the Società Anonima per gli Alberghi del Cadore and directed by cav. Paolo Marini of the Savoy at San Remo. It has 150 rooms, electric light, steam heating, a lift, dark room, lawn tennis and a carriage and motor service to Toblach and Belluno, with curtains and tapestries banished on hygienic grounds.
- The standing roads department, carrying Ing. Tedeschi's survey of the war on road dust and, in the following pages, news of new light railways.
- Ing. M. Tedeschi traces the campaign against road dust from O. W. Londgen's petroleum spraying near Los Angeles in 1898 through Ing. Rimini of Lugo, who proposed cheap gas tar in the review Le Strade in 1901, to Dr Guglielminetti's anti-dust committee at Nice and the new ammoniacal tar emulsion "westrumite" used for the Gordon-Bennett race. He reports the Swiss Touring's provisional Ligue contre la poussière and argues the Italian Touring's new roads commission already covers the question.
- Progress report on the Touring's road-signpost campaign: 983 signs now offered, worth L. 13,225, with fourteen provinces subscribing money and fifteen technical offices sending lists of sites. Siena has already erected 74 through Ing. Alfredo Meucci, Como more than twenty, and the King's gift of L. 1,000 is being turned into signs for the province of Rome; the Genio Civile of Turin is singled out for asking L. 40 to erect four signs that cost L. 40 in all.
- The first section of the roughly forty-kilometre secondary railway linking the Valle Camonica with Bergamo and Milan was inaugurated on 27 July. It will relieve the narrow Tonale road, which the Touring has had to signpost as dangerous, and carries evident military as well as commercial importance.
- The eleven-kilometre branch from Castellanza to Cairate-Lonate Ceppino opened on 17 July, built by the Novara-Seregno company and worked by the Nord; twenty-six spinning, dyeing, paper and comb works along the line will benefit, and a link to Mendrisio via Mornago-Varese is under study with the Gothard-Bahn.
- Three Turin merchants who found no third-class seats on the Ciriè-Lanzo line and moved into a second-class compartment were reported by a conductor, but the urban magistrate acquitted them once it was established that no third-class places had been available.
- The standing mountaineering department, reporting the Società Alpinisti Tridentini's XXXII meeting at Cavalese on 7 August, where president Dr Carlo Candelpergher declared the S.A.T. much obliged to the Touring, and the founding of a sports society at Gargnano on Lake Garda.
- Avv. nob. Zugni Tauro and Gino Doriguzzi of Feltre, with the guides Bortolo Zagonel, Michele Bettega and the porter Domenico Scalet, made the first Italian traverse of the north-west face of the Pala di San Martino in the Primiero Dolomites, reaching the summit at eleven after starting at four. The day before they had crossed the Punta della Madonna by the Winkler Camin and gone on to the Sass Maor.
- The standing motoring department, opening with a survey of practical public motor services at home and abroad.
- Survey, taken with additions from Italia Militare e Marina, of motor vehicles in public service: the omnibuses of Speyer and the thirty De Dion Bouton steam buses at Rouen, planned French postal routes, Panhard services in Tunisia, a proposed Noumea-Bourail line in New Caledonia, Khilkoff's Black Sea scheme in Russia and the Spoleto-Norcia steam service in Italy. It concludes that spirit cars beat steam for such work on speed and instant starting.
- The motor-car department, given this month to the technical anatomy of the Gordon-Bennett winner and to notes on the Cadore and Gressoney services.
- Technical description of the car Théry drove to victory: a four-cylinder cast-iron engine of 150 mm bore and 140 mm stroke giving 80 HP at 1,200 rpm within the 1,000 kg limit, Simms-Bosch magneto, chain drive, and a leather cone clutch reinforced by six steel rollers engaging a ring of 36 holes in the flywheel. It averaged 88.050 km/h over the Taunus circuit on 42 litres of petrol per 142 km lap.
- The motorcycle department, this month describing the Puch machine of Graz.
- The Johann Puch works of Graz build two touring engines, type A of 2 HP and type B of 2½ HP, hung low on the frame tube so the centre of gravity is dropped and side-slip reduced. It has a Longuemare carburettor, magneto ignition with the firm's patented interrupter, flat belt drive of 28-35 mm, pump lubrication from a tank holding about five litres of petrol, and a band brake on the rear wheel.
- Motor cars reached the Cadore in unprecedented numbers this season despite Tai lying more than forty kilometres from Belluno station: five passed through the square at Tai within a quarter of an hour, including those of Dr Gildo Guastalla, baron Giovanni Rossi of Schio and the sportsman Alessandro Vanzo. The writer detects local hostility and warns carters they can no longer sleep on their wagons or leave horses loose on the road.
- Romualdo Busca's Società Auto-garage Gressonese now runs four cars in connection with four trains between Pont Saint Martin, Gressoney Saint-Jean and La Trinité, bringing Saint-Jean within three and a half hours of Turin where three decades ago it took a whole day. The 27 km climb is taken in an hour and a half although the gradients nowhere exceed about 8.5 per cent.
- Ing. Sambolino of Turin has applied to the prefect of Savoy for authorisation to run a public motor service between Aosta and Moûtiers by way of Pré Saint Didier, La Thuile, the Little St Bernard, Séez and Bourg Saint Maurice, using 16 and 24 hp cars at 25 km an hour.
- A joint-stock company has been formed at Zurich under the chairmanship of the banker Gyr-Guyer with 100,000 francs capital, extensible to a million, to develop regular motor services between Swiss towns and transport services within them.
- Finding fines useless against speeding motorists, the New York police began arresting drivers together with their cars; on the first day the station houses were full of vehicles and the automobile club exhausted its bail money.
- The millionaire Luigi Schoenberg owns the largest motor car in the world, a "pullman automobile" twenty metres long containing two bedrooms, a dressing-room saloon, a bathroom, a dining room and a kitchen.
- At a full-dress gathering in South Dakota the Sioux excommunicated a tribesman who had taken his wife for a drive in a motor car, the tribe remaining loyal to the horse.
- The Russian postal bulletin announces that St Petersburg has begun carrying mail between the central and branch offices with fourteen motor vehicles, ten of large capacity, fitted with a newly invented siren whistle; Cambrai is meanwhile trialling a 36 km round through Proville, Noyelles, Cantaing, Anneux and Moeuvres.
- American applications of the motor vehicle: Dr W. H. Stamforth of Cleveland moves the patients of his dog and cat infirmary by steam van, Hartford has motor ambulances, Chicago motor beer wagons, New York police commissioner Greene inspects gambling houses and bars by car, and one merchant runs a travelling shop through the streets.
- The standing cycling department, given over this month to the volunteer cyclist battalions and to the tactics of the bersaglieri cyclists.
- Prof. Francesco Brombin, a reserve officer, published an appeal in Il Veneto on 22 July calling on Padua's cyclists to form a flying battalion of volunteers; within a fortnight enrolments were numerous enough that the municipality granted the Palestra Comunale and avv. Paresi lent the rifle club's weapons. The piece prints the appeal and an interview in which Brombin dates the idea to the previous year's manoeuvres at the Fadalto.
- The fencing master Magnani is raising a second volunteer cyclist battalion at Bergamo, with a third at Spezia under Prof. Corio, a fourth at Brescia under Mercanti and a fifth at Genoa under De Barbieri, all Touring consuls; the units are private and wholly autonomous.
- Summary of the appendix on bersaglieri cyclists in Col. Pietro Valle's Tattica ed armi nuove (Florence, Le Monnier, 1904). With a cyclist company coming to each of the twelve bersaglieri regiments — 1,440 men — Valle argues they should reinforce rather than replace cavalry in reconnaissance, push across the frontier ahead of an invading enemy, and be led by officers expert in topographical maps and left free to manoeuvre.
- Camillo Nardini of Noventa di Piave, two years and eleven months old and already a Touring member, pedals splendidly after the example of his father, the consul Silvio Nardini; a photograph accompanies the note.
- Stefano Minossi of Bergamo has invented an automatic eccentric-rotation crank that lengthens through the downstroke where the rider's effort falls and shortens on the return, claimed to yield 25 per cent more output while the foot still describes a circle of the same size.
- Illustrated account of the two-stroke marine engines built by the Lozier Motor Company of Plattsburg for small pleasure craft, explaining how the charge is drawn into the crank chamber, transferred through a side port and fired at each descent of the piston, so that the engine weighs about half a four-stroke of the same power. Ignition is by accumulator for starting and then by rotary magneto.
- The standing miscellany column of short notes on monuments, publications and exhibitions.
- The 7.20-metre obelisk raised at Sorio near Montebello Vicentino in 1867 to the Italians who fell in the first battle of 1848 is now unsafe through weather and vandalism; a committee under senator Luigi Cavalli of Vicenza, one of the Thousand of Marsala, is collecting subscriptions to restore it.
- The Venice section of the Dante Alighieri society will publish Prof. De Toni's toponymic study, the fruit of ten years' research in Austrian official publications and early survey maps, arranged as a double dictionary matching Italian names beyond the political frontier with their imposed foreign forms and vice versa.
- Correction of the August number, which through a make-up error printed a cut of Prato's Palazzo Pretorio instead of the castle; the right view is given here. Prince Tommaso Corsini writes that the castle's now-hidden doorway shows a very close relation to Castel del Monte in Apulia, a case he believes unique among Tuscan buildings.
- Ettore Tito has designed the poster for the VI International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice (22 April to 31 October 1905), a fresh composition dominated by the bust of a Venetian girl set among elzevir lettering.
- The book-review column, noticing P. Jousset's L'Italie illustrée (Larousse), Fermo Magni's Guida illustrata della Valsassina with Prof. Mario Cermenati's naturalists' appendix, the rewritten second edition of Rajmondi's Guida di Ferrara, Giannino Ferrini's commemoration of the alpinists Casati and Facetti, the Milan C.A.I. section's Annuario 1904 and Salvatore de Marco's Bagni di Caramanico.
- The Touring's standing legal-advice department, run by the head of the legal section avv. Bernardo Garbati, comprising reported judgments and answers to members' queries.
- Sub-heading under which the department prints court decisions of interest to cyclists and motorists, this month two magistrates' judgments from Brescia and Sulmona.
- Sent in by the member Pietro Gioja of Brescia, the magistrate's judgment acquitting Cesare Bresciani of riding a bicycle without the tax stamp, holding that the declaration certificate must remain valid until the stamping office actually opens, in line with the Messina prefect's decision reported in June 1904.
- Forwarded by avv. Rosalino Colarossi of Sulmona, the local magistrate's ruling that article 88 of the town's police regulation — banning bicycles from every inner street on fair, market and feast days — is illegitimate and unconstitutional under article 5 of the 1897 velocipede regulation, both in procedure and in substance.
- Avv. Bernardo Garbati opens a slimmer question-and-answer column and rules that a detachable side seat rigidly bolted to a motorcycle is a tricycle, not a trailer, and carries no extra tax beyond the flat L. 20; that a lampless bicycle wheeled by hand at night breaks no rule; and that a careful cyclist is not liable for damage done by a shying mule.
- The club's own announcements and news, covering its award at Bologna, its book depots, new publications and the roads commission.
- At the Bologna exhibition the Touring Club Italiano was awarded the Ministry of Public Instruction's grand medal of honour as well as a special diploma of high merit.
- The firm G. B. Paravia has taken the general depot for Touring publications and placed them with its correspondents throughout Italy; members presenting a stamped card get 25 per cent off. A first list of the participating booksellers follows, from Turin, Parma and Bergamo to Palermo, Messina and Bari.
- The Touring's motoring yearbook is out, a volume of 600 pages covering everything the motorist and motorcyclist needs for the Kingdom and neighbouring regions; it proved bulkier than planned, so the price is L. 5 to non-members and L. 2.50 to members.
- The Touring has begun a series of small railway-line guides, each describing about 150 km with a map specially made by the Istituto Geografico Militare and numerous vignettes. The first group (Milan-Turin, Milan-Bologna, Milan-Verona) is out at 50 centesimi each, with the Genoa and Venice groups to follow.
- The Touring's new commission for improving the roads has opened two prize competitions — a monograph on the road conditions of any province of the Kingdom, closing 31 May 1905, and a practical manual for the road cantoniere, closing 30 April 1905 — and the president has circulated the authorities setting out its programme of studies, inquiries and prizes.
- Twenty-second list of affiliated hotels, with room and meal tariffs and garage places, at Livorno, Prato in Toscana, Rimini, Siena, Taranto, Urbino and Viterbo, all giving members 10 per cent off the total bill. A warning follows that the Albergo Corona Reale at Viù is advertising affiliation the Touring has never granted.
- Fifth list of affiliated petrol depots, numbers 225 to 243, from Alessandria, Barlassina, Bobbio and Bracco to Genoa, Lucca, Milan, Novi Ligure and Oulx, giving each dealer's trade, the grade and price of benzine per kilogram and the opening hours.
- List of candidates for membership of the T. C. I. who applied between 15 July and 15 August 1904, divided into life members — among them count Gaetano Bonoris of Mantua — and annual members arranged by consulate, with a foreign section including Budapest, Paris, Fiume, Innsbruck, Bellinzona and Tientsin.