Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 18, No 2
Articles in this issue
- Silio Carpani's historical reverie follows a young Roman patrician and two slaves riding the consular road through Roman Africa, past Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Cirene and through markets crowded with Ethiopian porters and Greek and Phoenician traders, closing on a prophecy that barbarian invasion and sand will bury the province.
- The T.C.I.'s second winter week at Pontedilegno opens over-subscribed, with a purpose-built sports ground, the grande marcia del T.C.I., military, bob and skating races and prizes in cups, art objects and medals; a detailed account is promised for the March Rivista.
- Travel notes signed M. Oro on the express internacional from Buenos Ayres to Mendoza across 1,048 km of pampa, then the metre-gauge Transandino rack railway past the Cacheuta mineral baths, Puente del Inca, Aconcagua (6,835 m), Las Cuevas and the summit tunnel to Caracoles, Lago del Inca and Los Andes, with rotary snowploughs and a thirteen-hour delay.
- Photographs of the Duchess of Aosta aboard the hospital ship Menfi, with the Marchioness Guiccioli and Commander Salvio, and of wounded being embarked at Tobruk.
- Il ritorno dalla Tripolitania dei militi della Croce Rossa (sezione di Milano). (opens in a new tab)Photographs of the Milan section of the Red Cross returning from Tripolitania, at Milan station and marching along the Via Manzoni.
- Italo Bonardi on Monte Isola in the Lago d'Iseo: George Sand's "diamond set in green banks" and her affairs there with De Musset and Chopin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Oldofredi and Martinengo families, and the island's 1,500 net-making and fishing inhabitants at Peschiera, Maraglio and Carzano.
- Ing. Giovanni De-Simoni surveys the nine-million-square-kilometre desert: shifting dunes, oases and wells, the Tuareg and Tibbu peoples, caravan roads from Tripoli via Gatrun and Bilma towards Lake Chad and to Timbuktu, French artesian wells that killed off the inland-sea scheme, and explorers from Mungo Park and Caillié to Rohlfs at Kufra.
- A full page of photographs of the 1912 winter fashions shown in Paris.
- Fausto Valsecchi on writers who thought on the move: Nietzsche, who drafted L'origine della tragedia on campaign and Zarathustra in the Riviera hills and grew almost manically attached to Turin; Goethe travelling by diligence at the time of the Elegie Romane; and Flaubert's rapture over the Lake of Como that Stendhal loved.
- Notice that the Tripolitania and Cyrenaica map goes only to members renewing for 1912 and is never sold; over sixty thousand payments in the first fortnight of January mean members must await their turn for despatch.
- Ing. Igino Saraceni reviews the Grand Palais show: new fuselage forms and wing sections, the Ponche et Primard monoplane with its propeller behind the wings, the Tatin-Paulhan aero-torpille, Coandă's aeroplane torpedo-launcher, the 60 HP Salmson (Canton-Unné) and Burlat engines, the Doutre stabiliser, Blériot's variable-pitch military propeller and the Clément-Bayard airship car.
- Giorgio Molli argues whaling is far from finished: the last New Bedford barks Sunbeam, Josephine and Andrew Hicks, harpoon guns and howitzer harpoons, fifty barrels of spermaceti from a single head, and the Newfoundland seal fleet — nineteen steamers and 3,377 men out of St John's in 1909, the Florizel alone taking 20,488 seals.
- Vincenzo Santelmo describes the Certosa di S. Lorenzo in the Vallo di Diano, founded in 1300 by Tommaso Sanseverino and held by Carthusians until 1866: its gridiron plan, travertine façade, the St Catherine of Siena triptych, the 1503 choir stalls and the legendary thousand-egg omelette served to Charles V, now barely maintained by the Ministry of Public Instruction.
- The first lecture of the Borsalino endowment was given by L. V. Bertarelli at Milan's Circolo Filologico on 18 January, using lantern slides to link deforestation with floods, malaria and emigration and to argue for systematic reafforestation of the mountain woods.
- Photo news page: a 90 HP Mercedes at the Brussels Salon, Dumont's sail-car, the Saurer motor truck that crossed America, the Seine again threatening Paris, the air-propeller launch "Regina", the Sprenguel 12 HP racer, Spanish troops attacking at Melilla and the Persian army facing the Russians.
- The monthly news round-up, grouped under Aeronautica, Alpinismo, Automobilismo, Aviazione, Ferrovie, Geografia, Geologia, Marina, Medicina and Strade cattive.
- Airship notes: a propeller-less dirigible tried at Tegel Reinickendorf, the semi-rigid Veeh building at Milbertshofen, and Fosmann's pocket military airship.
- A dirigible tested at Tegel Reinickendorf under military auspices replaces propellers with a louvre-like vane propulsor, but appears not to have given satisfactory results.
- The semi-rigid Veeh under construction in the Milbertshofen hangar carries motors, crew and passengers inside a long Mannesmann steel-tube girder sheathed by the envelope, dispensing with the drag of an external car and its suspension rigging.
- Engineer Fosmann of Augsburg has completed a military airship of 37 by 6 metres, 800 cubic metres and 450 kg with a 24 HP motor, carried on a special motor car, inflatable in half an hour and handled by one man.
- The International Congress of Alpinism and Skiing called at Chamonix by the Club Alpin Français, and the first Italian and first winter ascent of Pizzo Sevino.
- Held at Chamonix in February alongside the VI International Ski Contest, the congress will debate ice-axe, rope and boot-nailing practice, a universal refuge key, substitutes for the Norwegian ski and rope use on glaciers; delegates get a 50% reduction on the French railways.
- On 1 January 1912 Angelo and Romano Calegari (C.A.I. Monza) with Avv. Carrozzi Senior (S.U.C.A.I.) left the new Carlo-Emilio refuge in the upper Val del Drogo at 7 a.m. and reached the summit about 13.00 by the NE face and E ridge in a blizzard, finding only a card left by Darmstädter and the guide Stabeler in 1892.
- Notes on the Indianapolis race, New York's motorised fire service and newly approved public motor-bus concessions.
- Besides the Automobile Club de France Grand Prix, an 800-kilometre race at Indianapolis on 30 May carries 250,000 lire in prizes — 100,000 to the winner, 50,000 to the second, and 1,000 each to the twelfth and last cars.
- New York's fire department is giving up horse-drawn engines entirely for fast motor vehicles with powerful fire pumps, and has opened a school to train the new drivers.
- The Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori Pubblici has approved motor-bus concessions from Castelbuono station to Petralia Sottana and from Belluno to Vittorio; the Rieti-Fara Sabina vehicles have been passed for service and a Terni-Ferentillo-Montagna line is to open.
- Notes on military aeroplane orders, the projected flight over the Andes, a cup for women aviators, climbing speeds at the French military trials and two forthcoming aviation shows.
- After the aeroplane's reconnaissance work in the Italo-Turkish war, Russia's War Minister has ordered 36 machines (24 biplanes and 12 monoplanes) and Greece six.
- A prize of 100,000 dollars has been offered for flying the Andes; the American aviator Harry Atwood is said to be about to attempt the Bahia-Rio de Janeiro-Montevideo-Buenos Ayres-Valparaiso route.
- Alongside the Coupe Schelcher for the Aéro-Club de France pilot who carries most women, the Paris women's aero club "Stella", funded by Max Brodsky, has created a cup for the woman pilot who carries the most men.
- At the French military competition Prévost on a Deperdussin reached 500 metres in 9 minutes, Védrines in under 11 and Frantz in 15, while Brégi climbed to 565 then 600 metres in 15 minutes and Moineau to 510 metres in 13.
- The first German international aviation salon will run in Berlin from 3 to 14 April, organised by the Kaiserlicher Automobil Club, the German constructors' syndicate and the Imperial Aero Club.
- A correction on the Tripoli-Homs line and the opening of the last section of the Massaua-Asmara railway.
- A correction: the Tripoli-Homs line reported in the January number lies in Asiatic Turkey, a French-financed branch off the Aleppo-Damascus railway, not between the two towns of Italy's new Libyan colony.
- The last Nefasit-Asmara section has opened, completing a 118-kilometre metre-gauge line with gradients of 30 and 35 per thousand, twelve stations and stops, many bridges and tunnels, and Italian-built Mallet locomotives.
- Notes on the reclamation of eastern Corsica and on the foreign trade of the Chinese empire.
- The French Senate has voted 11.5 million francs for river regulation, drainage and aqueducts intended to restore the malarial plain of Aleria to the prosperity it had under the Roman empire within little more than a decade.
- Chinese foreign trade reached 2,732 million, of which 1,157 million was export, with Hong Kong alone near a billion; Britain and Germany lead the import side and Japan the export, while trade with the United States fell 19 million in a year.
- Prof. Taramelli's note to the Istituto Lombardo on the Valtellina cloudburst of August 1911.
- Prof. Torquato Taramelli of Pavia reports that the worst damage from the storm of 21-22 August 1911 fell on the alluvial fans at the mouths of the side valleys and on abandoned moraine, and urges that torrent discharge be measured directly rather than inferred from sparse rain gauges.
- Notes on the projected liner Gigantic, the international navigation congress at Philadelphia and the loss of the postal motor vessel Romagna.
- The White Star Line is to build the Gigantic — 990 by 94 feet (301.75 by 28.65 m) — at Belfast on the same slip as the Titanic, outdoing both the Olympic's sister and the German Imperator.
- The 480-ton motor vessel Romagna of the Trieste-Ravenna-Fiume line, Italy's first ship with internal-combustion engines (two Diesel-Schulzer motors of 620 HP giving about twelve knots), was lost off Orsera on the Istrian coast in November with sixty lives.
- The month's medical note, on the search for a cure for cancer.
- Signed Dott. A. C., a report on the Berlin experiments of A. v. Wassermann with F. Keysser and M. Wassermann, in which an eosin-selenium compound injected into the tail vein of tumour-bearing mice dissolved the growths within about ten days without relapse; nothing has yet been tried on man.
- Members' reports of bad roads: Caorle-Portogruaro impassable and Caorle-Torre di Mosto little better, the Cervia road neglected, Rapallo-Portofino cut up by heavy carting, the Lecce-Gallipoli, Gallipoli-Casarano and Gallipoli-Ugento roads badly kept, and loose uncylindered metal on Torino-S. Ambrogio and S. Ambrogio-Susa.
- The Touring's official section for the month, carrying the Council sitting of 13 December 1911 and the consular appointments and resignations that follow.
- At the sitting of 13 December 1911 Bertarelli proposed filling the vacancies left by Favari, Ardenghi, Barutta and Piola Daverio with Senator Giuseppe Colombo, General Majnoni d'Intignano, Senators Luigi Mangiagalli and Cesare Mangili and Dr Gerolamo Serina; Johnson moved they be elected by acclamation.
- New consuls appointed at Arona, Canton, Caserta, Como, Milano, S. Maria Maddalena, Pontevico and Torino, with medical consuls at Cà Corniani, Cremona, Lesana, Palermo and Reggio Emilia and legal consuls at Amantea, Condino and Struppa.
- Consuls resigning or ceasing at Alba, Bricherasio, Castiglione Pepoli, Chefoo, Città della Pieve, Livorno, Montà, Parma, Senigallia and Treviso — several through death — together with the medical consul at Macugnaga.
- List of members who brought in five new adhesions between 1 June and 31 December 1911 and so earned the silver medal of the Hundred Thousand Members, from Barozzi of Lecco and Bassano of Sampierdarena onward.
- Twenty-two further members who earned the silver medal by presenting ten new adhesions, from Bossini of Coccaglio to Volonteri of Villadossola, bringing the running total to 1,890.
- Carmine Ambrosio of Milan is the month's sole gold medallist, the award going to a member who presents a hundred adhesions.
- List of members paying five years' subscription in advance — L. 30, or L. 40 from abroad — in return for a silver, similor and enamel badge and every T.C.I. publication issued during the five years.
- Candidates for membership who applied between 1 and 31 December 1911, opening with the soci vitalizi (life members paying L. 100, or L. 125 from abroad) from Agnellengo, Agordo, Alessandria and Ancona onward.
- Members enrolled between 1 October and the end of November 1911 who elect to count their subscription for 1912, listed province by province from Alessandria onward.