Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 16, No 4
Articles in this issue
- The Touring's «Per il bosco e per il pascolo» propaganda commission invites members and non-members to a photographic competition, run as a special category inside the Biella section of the Club Alpino Italiano's Concorso Internazionale di Fotografia Alpina Invernale, with a thousand lire of Touring prizes and thanks to Vittorio and Maurizio Sella and Emilio Gallo.
- The eighteen articles of the Biella C.A.I. competition rules: categories A (alpinism and winter sports), B (alpine views), C (the Touring's forest and pasture subjects) and E (colour, telephotography, panoramas); a jury of Bertarelli, Vittorio and Maurizio Sella, Guido Rey, Mario Piacenza, Agostino Ferrari, Guglielmina and Gallo; entries to Biella by 31 May, exhibited there in June 1910.
- The dolmen found at Bisceglie in contrada Chianca and excavated under prof. Angelo Mosso: a chamber of three upright slabs up to 3 m deep under a 4-metre capstone, a 7.80 m corridor, dolichocephalic skeletons, neolithic sherds matching the Pulo di Molfetta pottery and ox bones from the funeral feast.
- Signed «Gyb.»: Rome's 21 April birthday, from the legend of Rea Silvia and the Palatine auguries to Varro's 753 B.C. dating preferred over Cato's 751, the Palilia feasts magnified by Hadrian, Antoninus Pius's ninth centenary and Philip the Arab's millennium games of 247, and Pomponio Leto's revival of the rite in 1483.
- The annual Turin Salon in the usual Valentino pavilion now shows flying machines beside cars; the writer judges the internal-combustion engine settled and definitive, sees the exhibition as an index of national economic revival and of Italian progress in wing structures and extra-light motors, and promises a fuller review next month.
- Signed Attilio De Marchi: how the legionary marched, from Hannibal's 218 B.C. threat and Tiberius Sempronius Longo's forty-day march from Lilybaeum to the Ticino — tunic, leather cuirass, caliga, pilum and shield, sixty pounds of kit slung on Marius's furca — Caesar's forced marches of 45 km from the Aisne to Soissons and 74 km to Gergovia, his Rhine bridge, and the layout of the rectangular camp.
- Photographs of the Roccaraso ski meeting: Rivisondoli station at 1280 m, the highest on the State Railways, the Piano delle Cinque Miglia with ex-minister Tittoni, promoters comm. L. V. Bertarelli, cav. Michele Oro and the Duca Grazioli, and the Swede Smith jumping on skis.
- Signed Giuseppe Bevione: English fox-hunting, with two hundred Badminton-listed packs — the Quorn in Leicestershire, the Duke of Beaufort's, the Belvoir with 65 couple, the Bramham in Yorkshire — the dawn meet, huntsmen and whippers-in, the Master's ruinous costs, and the brush awarded to the first lady in at the kill.
- San Remigio, the only Italian comune exempt from conscription since 1627, instead enrols 10 to 12 young men a year for three winters as «soldati della neve», guiding and rescuing poor emigrants who recross the Gran San Bernardo from Switzerland into Piedmont; photographs show avalanche rescues and frostbite cases carried to S. Remy.
- Signed prof. E. Bertarelli: from Leonardo's high and low streets for Ludovico il Moro and Babylon's eighty-metre avenues to the modern dust plague — twenty milligrammes of dust per cubic metre after a car passes, septicaemia cases at Turin's S. Giovanni hospital on windy days — arguing for asphalt, concrete and tarring rather than the patent dust-layers ending in -ite.
- Concluding half of Giorgio Molli's steam-navigation centenary survey (subtitled «Un secolo di progresso della navigazione a vapore»): Italian emigrant liners from the «Po» and «Pampa» of 1870 to the Lloyd Italiano's «Principessa Mafalda», quadruple-expansion engines against Cunard's turbine trial of «Caronia» versus «Carmania», and a plea for an Italian merchant marine still to be built.
- Vehicles taxed between 1 July 1908 and 30 June 1909 — 467,131 bicycles, 5,063 motorcycles and 5,862 private cars, led by Milan with 944, Turin 825 and Rome 514; the war minister's bill for a Corpo nazionale dei volontari and rifle-range reform; the Cassazione's 29 January ruling that contravention-notice deadlines are not binding; and an automatic speed recorder with warning bell.
- Photographs of the Monaco motorboat week and the inauguration of the Oceanographic Institute: the Italian «Bianchi» (4 cylinders, 70 HP), the glisseur «La Flèche», the smallest entrant «Lilliput», the twin-screw stern of the «Ursula», the «Bayard Clément», «Gregoire VIII» and «Thélémaque Mors».
- The new Milan Club Nautico, promoted by Andrea Fasoli and backed by the Touring, took about two hundred Milanese and Pavesi on 28 March aboard the steamer «Pavia» of the Società Anonima di Navigazione Interna down the Ticino into the Po, visiting S. Michele at Pavia with prof. S. Ricci and passing the Becca bridge works.
- Aviation news in pictures: the Frey biplane's accident at Cannes, Molon's disastrous fall in a Blériot monoplane, Karman's world record with two passengers, the monoplanes of the Prince of Nissole, Lioré and Dufour, and the death of the aviator Le Blon in the bay of San Sebastián.
- A plate of the newest aero engines: the two 125 HP Clément motors of the Clément-Bayard dirigible, the 50 HP four-cylinder Prini-Berthaud, the 30 HP two-cylinder Darracq, the 35-40 HP Gregoire, the Saulnier monoplane with its Darracq, and a snapshot taken at 30 metres from a Farman biplane in flight.
- News photographs: the new Corpo dei Volontari Studenti drilling at the Cagnola range, lieutenant Wallach's Austrian passenger dirigible, the Florence and Paris horse shows, the ex-racing cyclist Van den Born flying a Farman biplane from Châlons to Reims and back, the Berlin zoo show of marine and aviation motors, Rougier over the bay of Monaco, and Oxford beating Cambridge in the boat race.
- Minutes of the meeting of Sunday 3 April 1910, chaired by ing. Cesare Saldini: gold medals to ing. Enrico Forlanini and cap. Dal Fabbro for the dirigible Leonardo da Vinci, a patrimony up L. 65,292.19, 2,600 consulates, 7,000 road signs and 41 mountains waymarked in 1909, and a long debate with cap. Negrotto and Bianchini over Slovene place-names on the Venezia Giulia map.
- The hygiene department, given over to «Turismo infantile»: when a healthy newborn may first go out (after eight days in warm weather, thirty in cold), how long by age, what makes a good pram, why closed cabs and trams carry infection, and Valagussa's modified French clothing scheme up to the fourth month.
- The Rivista's monthly news miscellany, running from aeronautics and archaeology through motoring, aviation, cycling, ethnography, exploration and railways to folklore and navigation.
- Claude's partial liquefaction of air as a cheap source of abundant hydrogen for airships, and why liquid hydrogen — 800 times denser but needing extreme cold and difficult vessels — can only be an emergency supply; commandant Renard argues reconnaissance is the airship's essential military use and dismisses «atmospheric bombardment» as imprecise and impossible to gun from a gondola.
- Dr Bode of the Berlin royal gallery bought a wax bust in London for 200,000 lire as a Leonardo; it proved to be an 1846 work by Richard Cockle Lucas, betrayed by a scrap of nineteenth-century English cloth inside it. Also Dr Bombe's claim for the Perugia plaster casts, Ludwig Mond's bequest to the National Gallery, and mosaic-paved baths uncovered at Castelporziano.
- The «Isat» funnel-separator-anti-overflow: a diaphragm that traps even half a drop of water in petrol before it reaches the carburettor, sparing the driver a full strip-down, and shuts itself off when the tank is full; prices and instructions from the Touring.
- What a flying ground must offer: at least three kilometres of perimeter, firm prairie without streams, ditches or tall vegetation so that landings are not burials, and shelter from strong air currents — since only pilots such as Latham and Paulhan dare take on a storm.
- A synoptic table of the paced hour record from Dodds's 25.508 km in 1876 to Paul Guignard's 101.623 km in 1909, marking the leaps of Cortis (1882), Osmond (1893), Stocks, Taylor (1900) and Robl (1903 and 1906), and noting that Arthur Linton, Jimmy Michael and H. D. Elkes are dead while Henry Fournier, Lesna, Mecredy and Jules Dubois moved to motoring and aviation.
- Chinese delicacies beyond dog meat: «rotten» eggs in fact cured in lime for twenty-five or thirty years until the yolk blackens, shark fin shredded into an omelette, and the nests not of swallows but of the sea-dwelling salangana, whose fucus-and-saliva lining is eaten.
- The Riabushinsky expedition's zoologists and geologists in Kamchatka and the 4,800-metre Klyuchevskaya; the Von Knebel party drowned by a landslide into Lake Askja in Iceland; a 3,000-verst Russian survey of the East Siberian coast; Amundsen sailing the Fram through Bering Strait in June; and Kozlov's find at Kharakhoto of over 1,000 volumes and 400 manuscripts in seven languages.
- The Rocchette-Asiago rack railway opened on 10 February: 22 km rising from 282 m to a maximum 1,407 m at Treschè Conca, six kilometres on the Strub rack at 125 per mille, six tunnels and a 150-metre bridge over the Astico, built by the Società Veneta for about three million. Also the Ghinda-Nefasit section of the Eritrean line and the 178-metre Asopos viaduct near Thermopylae.
- Americo Scarlatti's «I proverbi popolari sul mese di Aprile»: «Terzo aprilante, quaranta dì durante», Tuscan, Milanese, Genoese, Bolognese and Sicilian sayings on April rain, sleep and not shedding clothes, and Pitrè's tale of March borrowing three days from April to kill the old woman and her sheep.
- The fiftieth anniversary of the Suez Canal passed almost unnoticed — works begun April 1859, the sea-way open November 1869, first through was an Austrian sailing ship named «Primo». Also a proposed British ship canal from the Firth of Forth to the Clyde by Loch Lomond and Loch Long, and Russian, German, French and Swiss inland-waterway schemes.
- Book notices: Victor Cambon's «L'Allemagne au travail», Tullo Massarani's «La vita a Parigi», Angelo Mariani's «Geografia economica-sociale dell'Italia», the «Almanacco Italiano 1910», Marcelle Tinayre's «Notes d'une voyageuse en Turquie», Premoli's «Vocabolario nomenclatore illustrato» (the first to admit sporting and touring terms) and commandant Paul Renard's «L'Aviation», followed by books received as gifts.
- Enrico Ferri visited the Touring's Milan headquarters on 25 March with comm. Giovanni Silvestri; vice-director Bertarelli showed him the Carta d'Italia, the illustrated monographs, the Commissione Strade's technical works and the forest-and-pasture publications, after which Ferri asked to be enrolled and promised to publicise the club at the 1910 Buenos Aires exhibition.
- Signed L. V. L.: the duty cut of 20 March 1907 on petrol and paraffin brought consumers no relief but let foreign producers take the market and cut the wings of the new Italian oil companies; a further third off in January 1911 under the Russian commercial treaty would finish them, leaving motorists, submarines and airships dependent on imports despite Italian fields at Velleia and Montechiaro.
- Eighty-six alpine guide booklets issued by the waymarking consortium; the council of 1 July 1909, on Bertarelli's wish and ing. Francesco Pugno's proposal, widened the statute to «segnalazioni sui monti italiani», drawing in the C.A.I. sections of Rome, Genoa, Como, Padua, Parma, Vicenza, Auronzo, Bologna, Turin, Verona and Pinerolo; painted boards on posts, rock or walls will replace minium blazes.
- Resolutions of the Direzione generale: a delegation to the Verona congress on air-navigation law, a gold medal to the Automobile Club di Milano's chauffeurs' school, a nautical-tourism chalet, pontoon competition and Turin-Venice river cruise for the 1911 Turin exhibition, a contest between provinces for a model Turin-Rome road, and a commission under gen. Porro to revise the place-names of the 1:100,000 military map.
- New consular appointments under the AMMINISTRAZIONE banner, from conte Ludovico Carnevali at Appignano and cav. Alessandro Ferro at Buenos Ayres for the Italian Chamber of Commerce to Ambrogio Riva at Shanghai and Vitale y Alfredo at Mar del Plata.
- The signposting fund, with 4,986 signs placed by 31 January 1910 and a total of L. 67,642.25 subscribed, and a notice that public administrations buying five lire's worth of the Touring's Manuale del Cantoniere may credit the sum to their own signpost fund.
- New donations to the signposting fund on top of L. 65,422.50 already subscribed — Crespano Veneto 290 lire, Brescia 150, the provincial deputations of Verona, Campobasso and Cosenza 100 each, Filippo Schoeller of Menton 100, Crevalcore 100 and the Genio Civile of Teramo 125, among many municipal gifts of five to seventy-five lire.
- List of members who have taken up five-year subscriptions, from ten. gen. comm. Florenzio Aliprindi of Rome to C. Dante Zotta of Buenos Ayres, totalling 1,645.
- Eight members recorded as benemeriti for propaganda work, including Cristiano Alborno of Bordighera, Italo Ceruti of Naples, Severo Faré of Viggiù and avv. Giuseppe Gorio of Milan.
- Candidates for membership who applied between 1 and 28 February 1910, listed first as life members — among them the Deputazione Provinciale of Caserta, the chambers of commerce of Fermo and Mantua, the Società Anonima Ferrovie Nord and the municipalities of Parma and Udine — then by province as annual members.