Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 16, No 11
Articles in this issue
- Notice asking members to renew for 1911 by postal order of L. 6 (L. 8 abroad) to the T.C.I. headquarters in via Monte Napoleone 14, Milan, and setting out the terms for converting an annual subscription into a five-year (L. 30) or life (L. 100) membership.
- Leader lamenting that after the Calabrian and Sicilian earthquakes the floods have now devastated some of the loveliest districts of southern Italy, and announcing the plates of those places printed in this issue to stir members' sympathy and practical help.
- Photographic plates of the flood-stricken southern districts: panoramas of the island of Procida from the Castello, of Ischia town, of the Marina di Casamicciola under Monte Epomeo and of the Casamicciola beach (Alinari photographs).
- Argues that after the cut to L. 6 raised Italian bicycle plates from about 450,000 in 1909 to nearly 700,000, the tax should fall again to L. 3, citing France, where reductions in 1899 and 1906 doubled registrations twice over, and noting that only France and Italy still levy a special government bicycle tax.
- Reprints John W. Ward's flattering article in The Yachtsman on the T.C.I.'s 1911 Turin-Venice-Rome motorboat cruise: down the Po to Pavia and Venice, 2,300 km of coastal cruising to Naples and Anzio, then up the Tiber to Castel Sant'Angelo, with a 100,000-lire prize fund and entries including the Duke of Westminster's Ursula.
- Ten requests to prosecute deputies for motoring offences under the 1905 road police regulations, involving Candiani, Torlonia, Giovanelli-Chigi (two), Marzotto and Luzzatto, mostly for speeding or a missing left lamp, used to argue that Italian motoring law is arbitrary and needs modernising.
- Prof. P. Gamba of the Royal Geophysical Observatory at Pavia reports the pilot-balloon soundings made at Domodossola and the Simplon during Geo Chavez's Alpine flight, proving the vortices whose existence had been denied, and blames the Zeppelin Deutschland disaster on the crew's failure to consult the Aachen and Lindenberg observatories.
- The Touring Club Italiano's stands at the Buenos Aires and Brussels international exhibitions were each awarded the Grand Prix with gold medal and diploma.
- Filippo Tajani on the machinery of a modern port - Armstrong's hydraulic cranes giving way to electric ones, coal grabs, grain silos and suction elevators, tank wagons for oil and wine - and on the new electric traction over the Giovi pass, with 13,000-volt three-phase supply and 380-tonne trains behind two locomotives, adding some 500 wagons a day to Genoa's capacity.
- Describes Milan's new pneumatic post: about nine kilometres of 8 cm steel tube buried 1.2 m deep from the central post office through via S. Maria Segreta, via Dante and Foro Bonaparte to piazza Giovine Italia and to the Central Station, driven by a 60 HP electric motor working a twin compressor-exhauster.
- Picture page on the French railway strike: the deserted salle des pas perdus at the Gare Saint-Lazare, engines driven by strikers at the northern junctions, soldiers guarding the stations, and motor cars carrying travellers from Paris to Calais at fabulous fares.
- Traces geographical knowledge from Homer's 450-kilometre world and Odysseus's wanderings through Herodotus on the Danube and Scythia and Strabo and the Platonic astronomers, to the tenth-century Cottonian Library map, the Arab disc-world map of about 1150 and the charts Marin Sanudo added for the Venetians.
- Photographs of the famous street dogs of Constantinople, rounded up by the new government's police order and deported to Oxia, a deserted islet in the Sea of Marmara.
- Essay on the Italian moving season at San Martino and San Michele, when whole households are turned out onto the street; recalls Victor Emmanuel's Piedmontese pun before Solferino and Balzac's eye for furniture, and describes the carts and vans parading Milan's rising rents.
- Compares the meticulous preparation of the Alpine aeroplane crossing - signal posts, prolonged aerological soundings, rescue parties along the whole route - with Wellman's failed Atlantic attempt in the airship America, an obsolete 40 km/h craft sent from Atlantic City with no trial flights, no weather soundings and no escort vessel.
- Plate of stands at the 1910 Paris aeronautical Salon: Clerget, Antoinette, Esnault-Pelterie and Astra (Wright licence) on the left, M. Farman, Hanriot, Somma and Vuitton on the right.
- Plate showing the aero engines exhibited at the 1910 Paris aeronautical Salon.
- Report on the 1910 Paris Salon, financially the most successful yet: where last year's show merely revealed unfamiliar construction methods to the crowd, this one marks a practical turn, with lubrication and simplification of engines the chief advances.
- Plate of Wynmalen leaving Issy with a passenger and flying over the Brussels exhibition, Legagneux and Martinet on Farman machines, and the airship Bayard-Clement over St Paul's Cathedral, the Calais semaphore and the Channel.
- Plate of the Cote Gaillon hill-climb: Ehrle on Benz at the first kilometres and first at the finish, Jenatzy on Pipe, Joerns third on Opel, and an unusual voiturette.
- Plate of the autumn 1910 Paris fashions.
- News pictures of the month, including the desolate town-hall square at Casamicciola, the authorities inspecting the ruins there, and the enormous boulders rolled down the mountain onto Cetara by the floods.
- On the newly unearthed unpublished Rousseau piece Il nuovo Dedalo, in which the Genevan discusses the possibility of flight and demolishes Father Fabre's scheme of an air-filled tube strong enough to lift a seated man, comparing it to Harlequin's four barrels of gunpowder.
- The magazine's monthly news roundup, arranged alphabetically by subject from Aerologia to Viabilità.
- Prof. Gamba reports that a sounding balloon released from the Pavia Geophysical Observatory one morning in late October crossed the Maritime Alps and fell about 250 km away near Bar-sur-Loup, where a chauffeur found it on the Greoliere heights - the first recorded balloon crossing of the Maritime Alps.
- The fifth Gordon Bennett balloon cup, flown from St Louis, saw the Dusseldorf cover some 1,995 km and beat De La Vaulx's 1900 record of 1,925 km; and the 75-metre airship Clement-Bayard II, which flew Compiegne to London in six hours, has been bought by the British War Office.
- Alpine news: the Carlo Porta refuge-hotel below the southern Grigna is nearly finished at a cost of 50,000 lire, the Societa Alpinisti Monzesi has built a refuge above Calolzio at the Passo del Fo for the Resegone, and a rack railway from Mandello to the Carlo Porta is proposed; also the new Capanna Lecco at Bobbio, Prof. Virgilio Monti's glacier markers at Valeille and Grand Croux, and a dispute over guides' versus porters' tariffs.
- A Ministry of Public Instruction survey counts 26 fine-arts schools, 425 schools of applied and decorative art, 11 conservatories and 159 music schools maintained by communes and autonomous bodies; also the first volume of the King's Monete medioevali italiane, the expected cardinalate of the Vatican librarian Father Ehrle, and the isolation works at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome.
- New and subsidised motor-coach services: Piacenza-Bobbio, Umbertide-Perugia, Gubbio-Perugia, Pracchia to the Abetone by the Ximenian road, Pergola-Mondavio-Marotta-Senigallia, Conegliano to Cortina d'Ampezzo, and a request by Garages Riuniti Fiat-Alberti-Storero for a Rome-Ostia line.
- The death of Lt. Saglietti, thrown from his Sommer at Centocelle on 27 October, Italy's second aviation victim; the Wright brothers' refusal to fly the Belmont Park race over Brooklyn; Tabuteau's 465 km in about six hours at Etampes on 28 October; the international unification of pilots' certificates from 15 February; and a martyrology of the 26 fatal flying accidents to date.
- Railway notes: the Mukden-Viju link will bring Paris within eleven days of Tokyo; the Bergamo-Milano direttissima advances after its promoters offered to compensate the State; 1908 statistics give the world 983,868 km of line; a railway school for 600 pupils opens in Peking; and Swedish State Railways introduce third-class sleeping cars on the Stockholm-Malmo run.
- Italian line news: approval of the Lucca-Pontedera railway and of a 4,950-lire kilometric subsidy for Mantova-Peschiera, the opening of the Como-Appiano-Mozzate and Camerlata-Appiano tramways, the Alba-Barolo trolleybus, the Monte Tre Croci funicular at Varese, and the new international Trento-Venezia line.
- Yachting notes: the Coppa dei Laghi, revived on Lake Como, was won by the Regio Verbano Yacht Club, whose Vestale (marchese Franco Dal Pozzo, steered by his brother Fazio) took the first three places from the Regio Regate Club; also a Lariano syndicate's purchase plans, Maccia's Mediterranean cruise in the old Magdalen, and preparations by Fiat, Isotta Fraschini and the Voltri yards for the 1911 Venice-Rome cruise.
- Japan's annexation of Korea, promulgated at Seoul and Tokyo on 29 August and renaming the peninsula Chosen; Capt. A. H. Haywood's return from Sierra Leone across the Sahara by Timbuktu, Gao and In-Salah to Algiers, 3,750 miles of which 1,600 in the desert; and Spencer's account of the destruction of Niagara Falls by power diversions and aluminium works.
- World coal figures for 1909: Britain 263,774,000 tons, Germany 146,507,000, France 36,654,000 and the United States 390,336,000, with per-head consumption of 4.14 tons in the United States against 0.20 in Italy, and annual output per miner ranging from 541 tons in America to 160 in Belgium.
- Shipping notes: the 23,000-ton turbine liner France launched at St Nazaire for the Havre-New York run, the 45,000-ton Olympic launched at Belfast with swimming bath and Turkish bath, Royal Mail's cheque of L. 23,792,625 for the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, and the Brown-Curtis turbines that drove the cruiser Bristol to 26.84 knots.
- Road news: the Cuneo-Prazzo national road in Valle Maira widened to five metres with a new viaduct over the rio Pagliero, a ministerial commission on road rolling, subsidies to Berceto, Gargnano and other communes, and complaints about the Roncadelle, Piove-Legnaro and Roman streets.
- Three appeals to members: pay the 1911 subscription of L. 6 (L. 8 abroad) before 15 January or lose the Rivista, with the list of branch offices and Touring Offices from Asmara to Venice authorised to collect it; take out five-year or life membership; and recruit new members toward the hoped-for 100,000.
- Prints in full the regulation approved by Royal Decree of 1 October and in force from 1 October 1912, for which the Touring had campaigned since 1906 and on whose ministerial commission the president of its own Commissione Strade sat.
- Summarises the Ministry of Public Works scale: two-wheeled vehicles may weigh up to six quintals with a 4 cm rim, ten with 6 cm, twenty with 8 cm and fifty with 12 cm; four-wheeled up to ten, fifteen and thirty quintals respectively, with a 70-quintal ceiling for divisible loads and fines of L. 2 to L. 100.
- Ing. Enrico Marcello of Caserta argues that articles 22 and 41 of the 1865 public works law, which hand the town stretches of national and provincial roads to the communes for a flat per-kilometre payment, leave them badly maintained, and proposes that the State or province take the upkeep back with a communal contribution.
- Explains that the old trade plates lapsed on 26 October and that makers, dealers and agents must now apply to their Prefecture on 60-centesimi stamped paper, with tax certificates, for triangular test plates; the movable tax badge costs two-thirds of the normal rate, or a flat L. 30 for motorcycles, and expires each 31 December.
- Consular business: Germi Gerino appointed capo console at Florence, new civil consuls at Bussolengo, Caracas, Castelsardo, Cavanella Po, Riccione, Stilo and elsewhere, new legal and medical consuls and military consuls at Milan and Genoa, and resignations at Busto Arsizio, Iquique and Moncalieri.
- Subscription list for the Touring's road signposts, carrying forward L. 75,120.75, with donations from the municipalities of Bolognano, Latisana, Pontevico, Edolo, Pescolanciano, Caltagirone and Thiene, the Deputazione Provinciale of Milan, the Veloce Club of Erba-Incino and the Fratelli Radice of Milan.
- List of new five-year members, from Bocca Raffaele of Ancona and Maria Bressi of Milan to Fenkart of St Gallen, Gasparrini of Zenon Pereyra, Larco of Callao and Schiaffino of Genoa.
- Candidates who applied for membership between 1 and 30 September 1910, listed first as life members (Asola, Bologna, Buenos Aires, Este, Milan, Naples, Pescasseroli, Pistoia) and then province by province and country by country, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, the United States and Beirut.