Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 12, No 2
Articles in this issue
- L. V. Bertarelli reports on progress towards the free 40-sheet 1:250,000 Carta Corografica Itineraria d'Italia, and introduces Prof. Giovanni De Agostini — trained at Justus Perthes in Gotha and author of the 1893-1900 bathymetric survey of the Italian lakes — as the 'personal force' who will execute it.
- Tabulates what every T.C.I. member gets free in 1906 — the monthly Rivista, the rebuilt Annuario Generale, four to eight sheets of the 1:250,000 map, the Trentino frontier sheet and two illustrated route profiles — a package worth L.21.50 to L.29.50.
- The Stelvio and Moncenisio profile booklets, with 18 and 19 vignettes and text by Ottone Brentari, are now going out to members to close the 1904 programme; two more follow for the Passo del Pordoi and the Piano della Fugazza (Schio-Rovereto).
- The Montebelluna club's season: a night ride by acetylene lamp to Lavarone and the Sette Comuni plateau, the Astico tourniquets freewheeled past the Austrian customs post at Buse, a visit to Count Guardino Colleoni's castle at Thiene, a raft trip down the Piave and the flag-blessing outing on the Monfenera.
- Mario Matucci's 1,850 km ride from Ceva to Paris and back over the Colle della Maddalena and through Gap, Grenoble, Lyon, Autun and the forest of Fontainebleau, arguing the bicycle beats motorcycle and car in mud, and praising French inns, steam-rolled roads and signposts over Italy's.
- The Rivista opens a members' inquiry on whether Italy's roadside paracarri should be kept or removed, after Brigatti defended them in the December issue and Matucci called them useless obstacles that catch a pedal or a car wheel.
- The viaduct linking Asiago to Roana on the Sette Comuni plateau passed its load test and opened to traffic on the 12th: 130 metres long, 75 metres high, ten years and over a million lire to build after its two badly-made piers had to be demolished and rebuilt.
- Profile of the Jesi club, its bimonthly bulletin L'Appennino Centrale, its outings on Monte Nerone, Catria and Cucco and into the Frasassi and Vernino caves, and Riccardo Ponzelli's winter ascent of the Gran Sasso on 3 February 1905 with guides Accitelli and Di Venanzo.
- Countess Teresa Miari Pelli Fabbiani drives from Mestre to Pieve di Cadore and over the frozen Passo della Mauria (1313 m) into Carnia, taking the Cavallera climb in second gear and needing a single antiderapant on the iced ascent to Lorenzago.
- New Year's Day ascent of the northern Grigna (2410 m) by the Touring consul at Introbbio, Angelo Tomè, with Gaetano Scotti's Pavia university party of the Club Alpino's Monza section, descending by the Esino side to Cainallo.
- Bologna students Zanelli, Osti, Gruppioni, Livi and Prezzolini cross the watershed from Lizzano in Belvedere over the Croce Arcana and the Passo della Morte to Monte Cimone (2165 m) in a sixteen-hour December traverse, bivouacking in a snow-filled hut until two in the morning.
- The Touring and the Federazione Prealpina issue five eight-page waymarking booklets at 10 centesimi each — Monte Laurasca, Cicogna-Vetta della Laurasca, Zuccone di Campetti, Cistella and Cornizzolo — with silver medals to the markers.
- James Gordon Bennett gives the Aéro Club de France a 25,000-lire art object for a new annual international balloon race, to be run under the rules of the newly founded Fédération Aéronautique Internationale with each affiliated club naming its champions.
- Godard and André of Paris devise 'Alumi-argent-radio-solaire', a silvered dope that makes balloon envelopes sun-proof, limits gas expansion and saves ballast; tested on the balloon Radio-solaire on 15 October and useful for masking the height of military captive balloons.
- E. M. sets out the terminology agreed at Paris — aerostat, aeronat, aeronef with its helicoptère and aeroplane subdivisions — and calls for a ruling on whether Italian should write areonautica or aeronautica.
- Motoring miscellany: Levavasseur's patented eight-cylinder engine and new twelve-cylinder units, the three-cylinder Buchet motorcycle motor, a 3 HP tricar for the Hamburg fire brigade, and Btow Brothers of London's pocket densimeter and combined petrol gauge and funnel.
- Preview of Turin's third motor salon at the Palazzo delle Belle Arti (3-18 February 1906): 85 exhibitors including 69 car makers, 25 late applications refused, a new 1,400 sq m hall and a 3,000 sq m buffet built, with portraits of president Marchese A. Ferrero Ventimiglia and secretary Mario Montù.
- Further photographs and the verdict on the Automobile Club de France's 28 July-8 August 1905 industrial-vehicle trial, in which 50 of 55 starters finished — among them Serpollet's two-deck steam omnibus (No. 48) and Cottereau's camion (No. 28) with the engine under the driver's seat.
- Report on the self-starter competition held at the Paris Salon des Champs-Élysées, dismissing cable-and-lever and compressed-gas devices in favour of firing a carburetted charge in the cylinders, which requires a relief and an admission cock per cylinder plus full coil-and-accumulator ignition.
- The Cadignan elastic wheel replaces the spokes with a double set of circular springs anchored to the hub and articulated to the rim under a solid rubber band; judged one of the best conceived of its kind but doubted for resistance to torsion under drive and braking.
- Opening of the year's review of Italian factories, with the Florentia stand at the Paris Salon and its new 18-24 HP cardan chassis — pressed nickel-steel frame, 100 x 140 mm four-cylinder engine, high-tension magneto, nid d'abeille radiator, ball-mounted gearbox on two pivots — plus the Reina, Zanardini & C. lamp works.
- The Hungarian Automobile Club will hold an international show of cars, motorcycles and motor boats at Budapest, with a section for new designs and inventions and a city-omnibus competition on whose results the Hungarian omnibus company will base an order for 60 vehicles.
- Public motor services: trials of the Caserta district line, the Martini omnibus working Locarno-Intra-Pallanza-Simplon that carried the press during Brescia week 1905, and the Schio-Rovereto service over the Piano della Fugazza due to start in spring.
- Programme of the congress the T.C.I. and the Automobile Club di Milano will hold in Milan on 24-29 May 1906 under King Vittorio Emanuele III's patronage: three sections on technical, economic and legislative questions, their themes, and the lakes excursion to Luino and Villa d'Este.
- The Automobile Club di Milano stages a touring contest with 120,000 lire in prizes and two gold cups over an eleven-day, 4,003 km 'circuit of Italy' from Milan through Rome, Naples, Genoa, Turin and Udine; chassis under L.8000 run a reduced 2,000 km in nine days.
- The Automobile Club de France fixes its August 1906 touring contest: Paris, Limoges, Aix les Bains, Turin, Milan, Trieste, Graz, Budapest, Vienna, Breslau, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, Spa, Brussels and back to Paris.
- The Automobile Club di Roma is founded on 21 January at Prince Alfonso Doria-Pamphili's house, with Sforza-Cesarini, Torlonia, Borghese, Colonna, Baron Franchetti and Tittoni present, and a board headed by Doria-Pamphili with Prospero Colonna and Enrico Maraini.
- Trade figures for 1900-1905: Italian car exports rose from 6 machines worth L.36,000 to 257 worth L.2,784,000, a 75-fold gain, while imports only quadrupled to 668 machines worth L.6,249,000.
- The finance ministry circularises the intendenze to suspend enforcement of the new cycle and motor tax until the regulation is issued and plates are supplied to the comuni, so riders are not booked for missing or expired contrassegni.
- From the Graphic, the armoured gun-car built by Daimler at Wiener Neustadt and tested in Austria: four-wheel drive for rough ground, armour plate even over the wheel spokes, a traversing gun turret at the rear and a driver's seat that drops inside the steel box.
- The Turin school opens its second year on 4 January in the Monviso school gymnasium with several hundred pupils; president Goria-Gatti promises a more practical course on ignition and tyre fitting, and engineer Carlo Frascari lectures on the new horizons of motoring.
- The Nachrichten für Handel und Industrie weighs Russia's market: no high mountains and huge distances favour the car, but long hard winters, unpicturesque country, appalling roads, hostile peasants and unskilled chauffeurs work against it.
- A dozen rival companies race their 230 motor omnibuses along the Strand (a hundred an hour) and Edgware Road, ignoring passengers' stop signals; the companies have now formally banned the practice, with over a thousand buses expected within months.
- Cycling miscellany: a back-pedal brake worked by a toothed disc on the crank, Wade & Jones of London's patented sprung handlebars in vertical and horizontal forms, the Frayer-Miller elastic chain wheel, the Chamberlain internal-expanding hub brake from Abingdon Works of Birmingham, and the Griffin/Lea-Francis planetary two-speed hub adopted by Rover, Raleigh and Triumph for 1906.
- At the League's Paris meeting the T.C.I.'s Avv. Ing. B. Garbati backs a German triptyque valid a year for multiple crossings and a French one on the same terms, and rebuts the Belgian club's call for right-hand traffic in Italy's large cities.
- Fourteen furniture firms with 23 model hotel bedrooms are admitted to the Touring's competition at the 1906 Milan exhibition, applications after 31 December being refused for want of space; the Rivista defends the brief's plea for simplicity against critics who called the rooms monastic.
- Renewed appeal for entries to the Exposition's competition on road-metalling materials, closing 15 September: the public works ministry has circularised the provinces, and Antonio Albertini of Modena, writing in Le Strade, is used to argue that provinces should pay for and coordinate their engineers' surveys.
- Ing. Massimo Tedeschi reviews Ugo Baldini's Hoepli volume Automobili stradali e ferroviari per trasporti industriali, whose road chapter sets the 600 million lire a year spent on ordinary-road haulage against the case for steam rolling, dust-laying and transport firms contributing to upkeep.
- The Valpolcevera mayors, with those of Cornigliano and Borzoli, resolve at Sampierdarena to commission their own road plan — a new road on the right bank of the Polcevera replacing the old Bocchetta route — after the province offered only preliminary studies; Ing. Boccardo of Rivarolo is appointed.
- The Gazzetta Ufficiale lists three roads added to Rome's provincial schedule: the Carpinetana from Segni station to the Marittima, the branch to Zagarolo station off the Maremmana Inferiore, and San Vito-Bellegra joining the Empolitana to the Maremmana Superiore.
- Il Mattino reports that Naples' technical office has completed a 4,800,000-lire scheme for the provincial road network, to be funded by a loan from the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, following Ing. M. Tedeschi's December article in the Rivista.
- The Touring's list of demands put to public works minister Tedesco for Milan Central: a cab canopy, French-style baggage weighing, illuminated clocks and destination boards, restored first and second class waiting rooms, a dormitory for emigrants, a third subway and an interpreters' office.
- A Milan-Genoa committee under Senator Erasmo Piaggio with Otto Joël and Tommaso Bertarelli asks the government only for leave to survey a direct Genoa-Tortona-Milan line, intending to build it with private capital.
- Minister Rava's circular to the chambers of commerce against hotels signed only in foreign languages; the Rivista calls it servility and quotes Angiolo Orvieto in Il Marzocco on Florence's Savoy Hotel, its 'Tea Rooms' and its 'Restaurant'.
- The Società Balneare di Venezia raises its capital, buys 27 hectares from the Armenian Fathers for villas and hotels, enlarges the Grand Hotel des Bains with a new salon, and plans to electrify the horse tramway from Santa Maria Elisabetta.
- Council resolutions of 9 January: set a date before 31 January for the draw of 1905 benemeriti prizes, take part in the Exposition's road show with the Touring's publications and photographs, collect gifts for the 1906 prizes, and issue a L.1 annual binding cover for the Rivista from Torriani.
- The auditors' minute of the 16 January ballot count on postponing the general assembly: of 2,419 papers, 2,373 approved and 46 did not, signed by Turrini, Magnacavallo, Sala and Moggia.
- Warning that a swindler is calling on Milan members offering goods at a fictitious 'Touring discount' and issuing receipts against their membership numbers, while another sells perfumery and braces bearing the Touring badge.
- The two juries, drawn from all over Italy, have nearly finished judging the bulky entries to the roadmen's manual and road-monograph competitions; results are promised in the next issue.
- Deaths of Severino Formenti, mayor of Cervignano and T.C.I. consul there, and on 29 December of Olimpio Cini, 36, a Livorno consul and founder-president of the Club Ciclistico Livorno.