Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 12, No 5
Articles in this issue
- King Vittorio Emanuele III and Queen Elena visited the Touring Club Italiano's Milan headquarters in via Monte Napoleone on 2 May 1906, received by director general comm. Federico Johnson and vice-director ing. Alberto Riva. They signed the register, were shown the Annuario 1906 and the Coppa d'Oro guide compiled by rag. Mercanti, and toured the correspondence, cash and card-index offices.
- Description of the Touring Club's 347-square-metre pavilion at the 1906 Milan International Exposition, near the via Domodossola entrance. Its fifteen exhibits chart membership growth to 50,435 at the end of 1905, print runs of the Rivista, the consular corps mapped on a 1:500,000 Italian sheet, member density by province, and the club's garage, benzine, hotel and doctor services.
- A walk through the cycle and motor-car hall in Piazza d'Armi at the Milan Exposition. Italian stands include Pirelli tyres, Fiat, Isotta Fraschini (a 120 HP racer), Florentia, Bianchi, Diatto, Frera, Stucchi, Zust and Krieger; the French, Swiss, German and Belgian galleries show Mors, De Dietrich, Renault, De Dion, Panhard, Continental, Benz, Opel and Mercedes.
- Plates of the chief views and monuments passed on the Coppa d'Oro motor-touring circuit: Bologna's Neptune fountain and towers, the Este castle at Ferrara, Arezzo's S. Maria della Pieve, Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo and Capitol, Siena, Genoa, Turin, Parma, Mantua, Verona, Cremona, Brescia and Milan cathedral.
- The Touring Club's presentation Guida itineraria della Coppa d'Oro, compiled by direction secretary rag. Arturo Mercanti and given to the A.C.M. competitors. It carries a general circuit diagram plus, for each of the eleven days, tables of times, distances, altimetry and services, warnings of dangerous passes, bridges, descents and level crossings, town plans and mountain-pass profiles.
- The magazine's standing motoring department, running from the Milan congress programme through American car statistics, war cars and public motor services to short news notes.
- Programme for the third international motoring congress in Milan, 24-29 May 1906, which Princess Letizia d'Aosta will attend throughout. Papers announced include Léon Serpollet on steam cars, Charles Jeantaud on electric cars, ing. Balloco of Itala on transmissions, dott. Alberto Pirelli on tyres and ing. Baillie of London on public motor services.
- Milan's excise department replaced seven guards and eight casual porters with a Darracq 8 HP motor van, driven by an excise guard, to collect returns and wine samples from the 37 toll offices along the city's 30 km excise line. The purchase followed studies by cav. Pizzagalli and a proposal by assessor Gerolamo Morpurgo.
- Motor skates shown at the Paris Salon are a miniature chassis with a motor between the rollers mounted on an ice skate, running at 5 to 35 km/h. Touring member ing. Montini of Bassano had earlier argued in the Rivista that such a machine was known as far back as Homer.
- Dott. Effren Magrini tabulates every American petrol, electric and steam car selling under 1,500 dollars — Maxwell-Briscoe, Pierce, Ford, Oldsmobile, Reo, Rambler, Cadillac, Buick, Knox, Franklin and dozens more — with power, cylinders, cooling, weight and price, and warns that 146 passenger-car factories building 357 types threaten European makers.
- Hungary's minister of education circularised school inspectors to have elementary teachers explain the motor car's usefulness to pupils and villagers, after complaints that stones, glass and refuse were being thrown at cars and drivers. The writer urges Italy's minister Boselli to issue a similar circular, and another asking motorists to curb their own excesses.
- Senator Pietro Manfrin, writing in Italia Moderna of Rome, attacks the proposed motor-car tax: it would raise a trifling 200,000 lire against a two-billion budget while choking the fast road communications that could enrich the treasury by tens of millions.
- French war minister Etienne inspected an armoured car at the Charron, Girardot et Voigt works at Puteaux — a 30 HP chassis with reinforced springs, bullet-proof plating and a steel turret firing sixty rounds a minute up to 2,000 metres, weighing 2,900 kg and carrying rails to bridge three-metre ditches. Eight were ordered by the Russian government.
- Public motor services spreading through Italy: 40 cabs licensed by Milan's council, a consortium of Alba, Govone, S. Damiano and Villanova d'Asti, Turin's 16 HP motor water-carts, Rome's six London-built motor coaches, and subsidised lines at Caserta, Tricase, in Sardinia (Palau-Tempio-Sassari) and across Foggia province.
- The magazine's standing photography department, covering hotel darkrooms, telegraphic transmission of photographs and the Turin amateurs' exhibition.
- Of the 8,600 questionnaires returned for the Touring's Annuario 1905, very few hotels reported a darkroom and some innkeepers did not know what one was. Delamarre's piece from La Photographie is reprinted with practical advice on proper red glass, a lantern, an 80x40 cm bench, porcelain dishes, a water supply and ventilation.
- Professor Korn told the Munich electrotechnical association that telegraphing photographs is essentially solved: his trials over the 100 km Munich-Nuremberg line sent a picture or drawing in ten to twenty minutes, and he expects the same over a five-thousand-mile submarine cable.
- The Unione Dilettanti Fotografi will hold its second exhibition in Turin at via Lagrange 29 in May, open to members and to any Italian amateur photographer.
- The magazine's standing roads department, on communal road maintenance, a Lombard touring circuit and enforcement of the cart-rim regulation.
- Of Italy's 138,000 km road network, 88,000 km are communal roads left to the parishes and badly kept. Ing. Manfredini in Milan's Monitore Tecnico opposes avv. Meda's motion to hand their upkeep to the province; the writer prefers compulsory circles of communes, but praises Turin province, which maintains 1,200 km of communal road for about 200 lire per km a year.
- La Vita of Rome urges completion of the short stretch joining the Valsassina road from Lecco to Bellano, which would close a 50 km circuit past the Grigne, the Pizzo dei Tre Signori and Val Muggiasca; the Touring is asked to back the Pro-Orobia and Pro-Valsassina societies.
- The Gazzetta dello Sport of 30 March reports road damage because the new regulation on cart wheel-rim width is still unapplied, small barroccio owners baulking at the cost. Ing. Massimo Tedeschi passes on the suggestion that the Automobile Club di Milano raise a fund to help them convert their vehicles.
- The standing signpost department, listing new donations of road signs and their placement across Italy.
- New signpost donations from Fermo Boschi of Pontelagoscuro, the councils of Gargano and Vigevano and the provincial deputations of Pavia and Milan bring the running total to 1,478 signs worth 19,274 lire, with individual placements listed at Villafranca d'Asti, Piacenza, Bergamo (twenty signs from the Società Automobili Lombarda), Feltre and Pavia.
- Console comm. ing. Oreste Lattes of Rome reports that the Director General of Customs has accepted the T.C.I.'s plan to place signs at customs posts telling tourists to stop and complete the temporary-importation formalities for a car, motorcycle or bicycle, with trilingual notices posted inside the offices.
- A Direzione Generale delle Gabelle circular to the customs directors of Savona, Turin, Milan, Como, Verona and Udine sets the duty on petrol carried in car tanks: volume agreed with the driver and multiplied by a density coefficient of 0.68, two or three litres waived for genuine travellers, and duty held on deposit for cars making short runs before returning abroad.
- The magazine's standing mountaineering department, on the Società Alpina delle Giulie and shorter club news.
- Profile of the Trieste mountaineering society founded in 1883 as the Società degli Alpinisti Triestini, now 490 members. It built the Opicina (397 m) and Alice (452 m) stone lookouts, waymarked paths around Trieste, explored over 300 caves including Trebiciano and Corniale, and publishes Alpi Giulie; its president is avv. Giuseppe Luzzatto.
- Book notices: Carlo Caselli's Speleologia (Hoepli), the Club Alpino Italiano's 1904-1905 Bollettino with Ferrari's illustrated history of its refuges, Rodolfo Namias's photographic yearbook, Ravigneaux and Izard's Principes et recettes for chauffeurs, Mittelbach's road-profile map of north Italy and south-east France, Vincenzo Rossi on the Middle East, and Gnaga's La provincia di Brescia.
- Round-up of periodicals: Cosmos praises Bertarelli's Touring itineraries, the Rivista Geografica Italiana notes the new 1:250,000 Touring map, The Car profiles Queen Margherita, Alpina describes Berne's alpine museum, and the new Paris journals Omnia and La Technique Automobile are launched.
- A large group of Touring members asked the club to run a competition for a pocket railway timetable with zone maps, no interleaved advertising and no more than 50-60 centesimi in price. The plan has failed for now because the railways' general management has contracted the official timetable to another publisher for several years.
- The club's standing bulletin of official notices, competitions, member discounts and Exposition arrangements.
- Convocation notice for the ordinary general meeting on Sunday 10 June 1906 at 15.00 in the Borsa hall, piazza Cordusio, Milan, with the agenda, the 1905 accounts, and elections to replace councillors Alberto Riva, Alfredo Zaffaroni, Achille Binda, Piero Favari and the resigning Bernardo Garbati; attending members get a 60 per cent rail discount.
- From the 20th of the month the Intendenza di Finanza will sell the 10 and 15 lire bicycle tax plates, and from 10 June every velocipede on public roads must carry one on pain of penalty; motorcycles and cars are exempt for now, and the Touring has applied to issue the plates at its own offices.
- The two juries have finished reading the entries at home; a plenary sitting on 20 May will decide the awards, which will be published in the political and sporting press, at the Touring's Exposition stand and in the June Rivista.
- Members who complain that the binding cover supplied is smaller than the magazine are told it is meant for binding the year's issues into a volume, not for use as a folder, and is exactly the right size.
- Members may buy L'Indispensabile, the Gualdoni guide to Milan, its surroundings and the lakes, for 35 instead of 50 centesimi, and the 200-page Guida Album di Milano e dell'Esposizione Internazionale 1906 at 40 per cent off, 0.60 instead of 1 lira.
- The Società Anonima Milanese Alloggi grants members and their families the terms announced in the April Rivista only where accommodation is booked in advance.
- The Giovanni Gerosa photographic studio at via Bagutta 14, Milan, offers a free portrait to any Touring member who sits for it on a voucher issued by the Direzione, the print sent home for the cost of postage alone.
- Season tickets for the Milan Exposition can be bought at the Touring's offices, which also sell members the amusements passe-partout at 8.60 lire instead of 9.
- Club runs and meetings: the Bologna section's tenth-anniversary ride to Bazzano and back via Casalecchio (50 km) with over seventy members and a charity garden party at villa S. Giuseppe; Sport Club Milano's open competition for its diploma; the Parma Auto Veloce Club's 1906 programme of outings to Valle di Baganza, Veleia and the Prealpi Orobiche; and a cyclo-motoring meet at Sestri Ponente on 3-4 June.
- Obituaries of cav. ing. Giovanni Grillo della Berta, who died at Sondrio after many years as a member and consul, and of sixteen-year-old Mario Albino of Campobasso, a keen cyclist who since 1902 had travelled Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, Austria and France alone and on very little money.
- List of the life and annual membership candidates who applied between 1 and 31 March 1906, arranged by province from Alessandria to Turin, and including applicants from Boston and Buenos Aires.