Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 15, No 4
Articles in this issue
- L. V. Bertarelli recounts his bicycle excursions to Volterra: the ten-kilometre climb from the Cecina-valley station past the State saltworks to the town at 534 metres, the Piazza with the Palazzo dei Priori and Palazzo Pretorio, the Etruscan urns of the Museo Guarnacci, the crumbling Balze and the Fonte di Docciola of 1245, illustrated from the 165 plates of Corrado Ricci's Volterra for the Istituto d'Arti Grafiche of Bergamo.
- Assunto Mori surveys the Himalaya and Karakoram: Crawford's 1805 reports from Bhutan, the 1818 measurement of Dhaulagiri, Everest at 8840 m, the 8620 m peak the Schlagintweit brothers called Dapsang and the English K2 or Godwin Austen, the hill sanatoria of Simla and Darjeeling, and whether the Duke of the Abruzzi will attempt Kangchenjunga now that Nepal bars the way to Everest.
- Renato Fucini's tale, dedicated to the painter Vittorio Corcos, in which prete Filippo and don Fioravante fall out over a woodcock in the Cerraia woods while their leaking parish roof goes unmended, only for an elegant stranger to shoot the birds first — he proves to be cav. uff. Temistocle Spunzoni, administrator of vacant benefices. Dated Dianella, March 1909.
- Silio Carpani defends devoting a touring review to St Catherine, whose feast falls in April, quoting Gino Capponi on the imprint saints leave on their age and arguing that without her the Popes might have stayed at Avignon and Rome be a necropolis; illustrated with Francesco Vanni's portrait in S. Domenico, Sodoma's frescoes and Neroccio's statue in the Duomo.
- Boxed statement of the Carta d'Italia's progress: 4 sheets in 1906 (Turin, Milan, Venice, Genoa) at L. 2, nine in 1907 and eight in 1908 at L. 4, the block of twenty at L. 16 to members; the Cefalù and Catania sheets are delayed by De Agostini's move from Rome to Novara, and 1909 members will receive Ravenna-Pesaro, Sciacca, Caltanissetta, Cuneo, Macerata, Chieti and Orbetello.
- L. V. Bertarelli welcomes the first ten sheets of the Istituto Geografico Militare's 1:200,000 Carta d'Italia — 91 sheets at L. 2, now sold to civilians — with 100-metre contours under oblique shading, seven symbols for settlement size, woods in green shading, and roads classified by width as the Touring first did on its 1:650,000 motoring map; he compares it with the French Service Géographique and the Viennese 1:200,000.
- The Club Alpino Italiano's long-awaited Gran Paradiso sheet, 65 by 76 cm, runs from the Colle del Nivolet to the Finestra di Champorcher and from Aosta to Locana, taking in the Grivola, Valsavaranche, Val di Rhêmes, Val di Cogne and Monte Emilius; derived from the IGM 1:50,000 with corrections surveyed above 1200 m by Staff captain Alberto Pelloux and alpini captain Giovanni La Ferrère.
- Paola Lombroso argues that women are constitutionally fit for sport and touring, citing an English census that found 104 women centenarians to 46 men, Billroth's preference for female patients when trying a new operation, and women's typing speed records, and interviewing signorina Dumontel, who puts her mountain stamina down to willpower rather than training.
- Taken from the Revue de l'Aviation: how earlier ages pictured flight, from Ovid's "ut coelum certe patet, ibimus illac" and the Icarus engravings to Domenico Gonzales's swan-drawn L'Uomo nella luna, Wilkins's Flying Men, the satirical Victorin plates and the pastrycook of Amiens dangled on a pole, and the 1633 tract concluding that large enough wings would suffice.
- The legislation-and-statistics department for April 1909, signed Italo Bonardi, taking in roadside tree planting, French customs returns for cars and cycles with the coming protectionist tariff, and the British motor trade in 1908.
- Only 110 of Italy's 6,000 km of national roads are tree-lined, against 23,000 of France's 38,000 km under the decree of 16 December 1811; Parliament's 1898 order of the day produced two bills, the later of which passed the Senate but not the Chamber, so the scheme of deciduous trees under ten metres planted at Ministry-approved sites lapsed.
- French customs figures show car imports down to L. 698 in 1908 from L. 8,676 in 1906 and exports slipping from L. 137,854 to L. 127,300, with cycles down from 7,384 to 6,888 quintals; the projected tariff revision would charge L. 50 on the body plus 50, 75 or 100 on the chassis, which the Touring warns against as Italy's motor trade lives on the French market.
- The United Kingdom imported 7,200 cars in 1908 for £4,112,461 — £440,000 less than in 1907 — and the same marked decline shows in its exports.
- News photographs of the month: Wellman inflating his polar airship, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt's tenting trials before sailing via Naples for his African hunt, the Niagara whirlpool left dry for hours when an ice barrier on Lake Erie checked the falls, mid-Lent "aeroplanes" in Paris, a Siberian pony of the breed Shackleton used, and the Monaco bay used for motorboat and aeroplane contests.
- Books received: ing. Giuseppe Franco's L. 3 Prontuario delle distanze chilometriche delle Ferrovie del Regno, praised at length for making the differential tariff intelligible to tourists; Ettore Marroni ("Bergeret") on his Asian journey; a Gazzetta dello Sport manual of Greco-Roman wrestling prefaced by E. C. Costamagna; Enrico Novelli ("Yambo")'s La rivincita di Lissa; Breda's Per la millesima locomotiva; and G. Esse's Automobilismo industriale.
- Giuseppe Patitucci sends from Johannesburg a photograph of two Zulu workmen laughing over a number of the Rivista Mensile, and reflects on how the Italian colony of the Transvaal keeps its patriotism alive through the Touring's publications.
- Since the law of 12 July 1908 raised the annual per-kilometre subsidy to L. 800, applications have revived: 26 motor lines are open to the public, 34 have been granted subsidies pending operation and 115 are projected, with welcome growth in the south and the islands; the Annuario dell'Automobilismo will list them all.
- Full report of the general meeting of Sunday 28 March 1909, chaired by acclamation by Ernesto Teodoro Moneta: Vigliardi read the council's report (62.27 per cent renewals, 13,482 new members, 70,000 in all, 800 new road signs for L. 19,000), Baseggio, Pizzagalli, Bianchini, Perona, Origoni and Gavirati debated the bicycle tax and its plate, road upkeep and elective consulates, and the 1908 accounts and the statute changes for a Touring headquarters and a Delegazione in Rome passed unanimously.
- The club's official section for April 1909, opening with the resolutions taken by the Direzione at its most recent sittings.
- Comm. Piola Daverio, president of the nautical tourism commission, proposes an executive committee to speed its work, boat trips from Lecco to Milan by the Adda and the Naviglio and from Mantua to the Po delta, and for the 1911 Rome festivities a Rome-to-sea cruise or better a descent of the Tiber from Orte to the sea; the Direzione backs him and votes the means.
- The Direzione generale delle Gabelle confirms that motor boats for inland lake and river navigation are exempt from duty and that aeroplanes and dirigibles brought in for flight experiments are admitted temporarily without deposit, pending a documented regime for them in future.
- Administrative lists for April 1909: new consuls, club doctors and legal advisers, the new soci benemeriti and the continuing roll of five-year members.
- Twenty-six new consuls from Benevento to Vinovo, including cav. dott. Alberto Labriola at Berlin, march. Gianni Crosa di Vergagni at Genoa, cap. Roberto De Gennaro at Turin, Edoardo Soika at Venice, military consuls at Conegliano and Modena and a university consul, Ugo Brandis, at Siena.
- New club doctors: Eula Donato Costanzo at Acqui, Attilio Salvatico at Calizzano, Domenico Stivanin at Camisano and Corrado Besson at Cassine, continuing overleaf with Vittorio Colosimo at Catanzaro, Carlo Mazzolari at Cremona, Luigi Pirovano at Crevoladossola and others.
- Four new legal advisers: avv. Camillo Solimene at Avellino, avv. Fedele Cavaliere at Barletta, avv. Gavino Fresu at Ozieri and avv. Giuseppe Buratti at Recanati.
- Nineteen new benemeriti — among them dott. cav. Silvio Benettini of Rome, cap. Giovanni Bonardi of Como, Umberto Gessaga and Tullio Tiscornia of Genoa, Felice Melotti and Luigi Taglione of Turin and Giuseppe Venni of Venice — bringing the total to 1,512.
- The roll of five-year members, running alphabetically from Dal Torso Alessandro of Udine through De Hirsch Harold of Paris, Ernesto Dello Strologo of Port Sudan and the Ferrari, Gatti and Rossi entries to Sciarra Remigio of Turin, and marked "Segue nel prossimo numero".
- New offerings to the road-sign fund from the municipalities of Bagno di Romagna, Pontecurone, Lucca, Novara, Conegliano, Paesana, Murazzano and Borghetto Lodigiano and the provincial deputations of Padua, Livorno, Ancona, Verona, Girgenti, Pavia, Pesaro-Urbino, Macerata, Ferrara, Grosseto, Piacenza, Porto Maurizio and Reggio Emilia, carrying the total to 3,453 signs and L. 51,642.50.
- The subscription table itself: 3,369 signs and L. 49,737.50 previously subscribed, plus contributions of 1 to 10 signs each from Bagno di Romagna, Pontecurone, Lucca, Novara, Paesana, Murazzano, Borghetto Lodigiano, Siviano and the provincial deputations of Padua, Livorno, Ancona, Verona, Girgenti, Pavia, Pesaro-Urbino, Macerata, Ferrara, Grosseto, Piacenza, Porto Maurizio and Reggio Emilia, giving 3,453 signs and L. 51,642.50.
- Members who applied for admission between 1 and 28 February 1909, listed as life, five-year and annual members by town — Abbiategrasso, Asmara, Buenos Aires, Iquique and Mar del Plata among them, with Bagatti Valsecchi, Bozzi and Visconti di Modrone at Milan and Diatto, Lancia and Leumann at Turin — running on through the provinces to Venice and the Swiss cantons.
- Closing membership statement: 68,303 annual members at 15 February 1909 less 672 resignations, untraceables and defaulters leaves 67,631, plus 1,099 newly enrolled to 15 March gives 68,730 annual members; 2,329 life members at 31 December 1908 plus 314 since 1 January makes 2,643, for a total of 71,373.