Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 15, No 1
Articles in this issue
- L. V. Bertarelli's New Year plea for love of the tree and against deforestation, tying Italy's southern question, malaria and floods to stripped hillsides, and illustrated with Romeo Moscioni photographs of Michelangelo's cypresses at Rome's Museo Nazionale, the cedars and oaks of Villa Torlonia and Villa Falconieri at Frascati, and the plane trees of Florence's Giardino dei Semplici.
- Praise for minister Bertolini's twin bills, which shift river defence from ever-higher Po embankments to reforestation, reservoirs and check dams in the mountain basins, and add a special law on inland navigation.
- G. C. Abba's portrait of the country between Cadibona, Nava, Chivasso and Bassignana: the Aleramo and Adelasia legend of the Aleramici, Carducci's version, the Acqui regiment's stand against the French, and the monferrina heard again in the Marche and among Garibaldi's Mille in Sicily.
- An Epiphany fantasy in which Melchiorre, Gaspare and Baldassarre call on the writer's snowbound Milan room in furs, cap and motoring mask, explaining that they have given up camels for the automobile, and recalling Barbarossa's removal of their Milanese relics to Cologne.
- Filippo Tajani on the luxury train: Pullman's American sleeping car, Nagelmackers' 1880 Berlin-Frankfurt dining car and the Wagons-Lits company's 400 restaurant cars, the Moscow-Vladivostok Transsiberian, Ostend-Constantinople and Calais-Engadine services, and the plan of a six-compartment vettura-restaurant.
- On 12 December the Società ing. Gola e Conelli demonstrated ing. Giacomo Guerrini's motor sweeper-collector on Milan's corso di Porta Vittoria after the vegetable market, before municipal engineers Cattaneo and Motta and the Touring road commission's cav. ing. Pugno.
- The eleventh Paris show drew thinner crowds than automobilism's golden years; coachbuilders offered hybrid torpedo bodies and multi-phaeton convertible limousines for wealthy eccentrics, tyres were unchanged, and the argument turned on whether the big firms' new vetturetta answers the ordinary buyer who wants to drive himself.
- After years of memorials and a parliamentary referendum through its consuls, a Touring deputation (comm. Johnson, comm. Bertarelli, avv. Bortolo Belotti with deputies Mira, Silvio Crespi, Lanza di Scalea, Vicini and senator Bettoni) put the case to Giolitti; on 13 December the Council of Ministers approved cutting the bicycle tax to L. 5, with a return to the fixed plate to curb evasion.
- Interview at the Paris Salon with Simons, the French illustrated papers' sporting photographer, on the bicycle as the tourist's favourite mount, the varnished mahogany folding camera he had built piece by piece with double lens decentring, the ideal lens focusing from five metres to infinity, and his hope of photographing from an aeroplane.
- The new aeroplane trade: Voisin and Wright biplanes selling at under 25,000 lire, over 1.5 million in prize money for 1909, the 58 HP eight-cylinder Renault and Milanese Anzani engines, and Isotta Fraschini's 150 kg 50-55 HP V8 with geared propeller shaft and gyroscopic mounting.
- At Savannah, Hilliard's Lancia beat sixteen rivals in the 25 November light-car race at 92.970 km/h with an Isotta Fraschini fourth, and Wagner (Fiat) won the Grand Prize in 6h10'31" from Hémery (Benz), with Nazzaro third and Di Palma lapping at 112 km/h.
- Skiing spreads from Norway to the Riesengebirge, Black Forest and Switzerland and is taken up by hunters, doctors, postmen and the alpine troops; ing. Adolfo Kind brought it to Italy, the first Sky Club Italiano was founded at Turin about 1901, and the new Unione Italiana dei Sky Clubs meets at Bardonecchia on 23-25 January.
- The Paris road congress reduced warning signs to four - crossroads, dangerous bend, level crossing and transverse obstacle - and at the 1 December meeting T.C.I. delegates Giorgio Berteaux and Stein resisted the proposed 0.70 m round disc, which in Italy would be confused with railway signals and would double the cost of the 5,000 signs already erected.
- The 9 November prize-giving in Milan's Salone della Patriottica for the first Po motorboat cruise, the national hotel-design competition and the Piacenza manoeuvre of the Volontari Ciclisti Automobilisti, with speeches by Bertarelli, ing. Piola-Daverio on inland waterways, senator Bettoni, avv. Belotti, prefect Panizzardi and mayor Ponti.
- Books received and reviewed, including Onésime Reclus's Manuel de l'Eau, G. B. Rossi's guide to the castles of the Alto Monferrato and the Langhe, Martinelli's manual of walking-stick fencing, senator De Martino's Cirene e Cartagine and the 1908 yearbooks of the Automobile Club di Torino and the A.C.I.
- Digest of the foreign and Italian press: the Revue du mois on Japanese origins, World's Work on airships making war rarer, the Esperanto schism reported by the Internationale Wochenschrift, Diana's reprint of Puccini's travel letter on London, Paris and Torre del Lago, and Japan's 70,690,000-franc motor imports in 1907.
- From February 1909 the administration will stop sending all publications, the Rivista included, to members who have not paid the year's subscription; with 70,000 members a 7.8 per cent shortfall would mean giving the Carta d'Italia and Rivista free to over 6,000 people.
- Photo page of the month's news: Dorando Pietri training in America, and the Somali country of the recent clashes with Italian troops, including the Barire fort trench held by a Maxim gun (photographs by Radlynsky).
- Recruiting appeal after some 13,000 new members in 1908 brought the Touring to 70,000, with 100,000 the goal; it lists what the subscription brings - the 80-page Rivista, the Annuario Generale, eight sheets a year of the 58-sheet Carta d'Italia and the illustrated regional guides to Umbria and Puglie.
- The Lloyd Sabaudo shipping and insurance company takes out life membership of the Touring, following the battleship Regina Margherita, a sign of how strongly emigrants and seafarers feel the association's patriotic appeal.
- Prof. Lucillo Ambruzzi argues that automobile, an adjective standing in for macchina, vettura or barca automobile, should be feminine - as Venice's Società Veneta di Automobili Nautiche has it - and calls for an inquiry among Florentine members to settle usage.
- Student alpinists meeting in Valtournanche undertook to give the Società Alpinisti Tridentini a refuge on the Torri di Vajolet, and the Stazione Universitaria now appeals to students and Club Alpino members to fund it.
- The Touring's Annuario dell'Automobilismo, sold out for 1908, takes this wider title for 1909 to cover cycling, motorboating, aviation and aeronautics; additions must reach via Monte Napoleone 14 by 31 December, and bookings are L. 3 for members.
- The pretore of Gallarate, avv. Umberto Guidi, acquitted lieutenant Alessandro Faraggiana of speeding through Gallarate with his lamps out because the notices, drawn up on 15 and 20 June, reached him only on 21 July, breaching the eight-day limit of art. 100 of the 1905 road police regulation.
- Council decisions: the Touring will attend the Turin cycle and motor show, medals go to the Circolo Romano Audax's Cimento invernale ciclo alpino teams, Berteaux and Stein will represent it at the signpost congress, a silver plaque honours cav. Vigliardi Paravia for remaking the Rivista, and provinces may take over ownership and upkeep of the signposts, beginning with Bergamo.
- New consular appointments, from Ariano di Puglia and Asinara to New York, Parigi, Port Sudan and Washington, plus the Touring's medical consuls at Frabosa Soprana, Manerbio, Modena, Sinopoli and Montecavolo and legal consuls at Dronero, Roma and Rutigliano.
- New petrol depots affiliated to the Touring at Aquila, Bergamo, Brindisi, Chiavari, Chiusi, Fermo, Locarno, Montebelluna, Nervi, Porto S. Giorgio, Rebbio, Recoaro and Vimercate, with grades, prices per kilo, Oleoblitz and Grasso Reinach stocks and opening hours.
- Fresh subscriptions to the signpost fund from the provincial deputations of Ascoli Piceno, Bologna, Cuneo, Pesaro, Vicenza and Perugia, the municipalities of Piombino, Varallo Sesia, Rimini and Augusta and donors including marchese Enrico Incisa and conte Gastone di Mirafiori, bringing the total to 3,360 signs and L. 49,737.
- Correction to the November table of vehicles at the Piacenza competition: the Soller car had 24 HP, weighed 5,050 kg empty and carried a 5,500 kg load.
- List of members taking the five-year subscription, from Allegri of Venice and Arzeno of Buenos Ayres to Zerbi of Saronno, drawn from across Italy and the Italian communities in Argentina and Brazil.
- The 1,467 members who earned benemerito status for recruiting, among them Giuseppe Baroni of Parma, Carlo Bini of Carrara, Luigi Castelli Della Vinca at Sevilla and Zuliano Zuliani, consul at Cervignano.
- Correction of the December prices for housing the 31-part Attraverso l'Italia: a polychrome cloth slipcase at L. 5 or two cloth covers at L. 4 each, L. 7 the pair; the work itself, with over 2,000 illustrations, costs L. 25 at the Milan office.
- Only the annual tax and tyre life still keep the bicycle from reaching the remotest Italian villages; the piece points to W. & A. Bates Ltd. of Leicester, thirty years in the trade, which has set up an Italian branch, The Bates Tyre Cy. L., at via Vittoria 51 in Milan under rag. Camillo Oggioni.
- Candidates who applied for membership between 1 and 30 November 1908, opening with the life members - from Brescia's conte Francesco Martinengo and Genoa's Carlo Emanuele Bombrini to the Istituto Coloniale Italiano in Rome and the Società Veneta at Padova - who pay L. 100, or L. 125 from abroad.