Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 18, No 9
Articles in this issue
- L. V. Bertarelli announces that an anonymous benefactor has funded the T.C.I. to build a 5.3 km carriage road from Lanzo d'Intelvi to the summit of the Sighignola (1317 m) above Lake Lugano, with a small belvedere-restaurant on top; Lanzo's council approved the convention on 18 August 1912, the project drawn by ing. Carlo Magistretti under ing. Italo Vandone.
- A traveller's survey of Cyrenaica as a tourist destination, from Bengasi's rebuilt souks and water problem through Tolemaide (Tolmetta), Cirene, Barca-Merga, Tocra and Derna, with advice on hiring horses and camels; illustrated with photographs by Dott. Leidi, A. Mercanti and the Italian Archaeological Mission.
- A guide to the artillery vocabulary misused by war correspondents — palla, granata, shrapnel, obice — running from the first Armstrong breech-loader and the Dandolo's 100-ton gun to Ghent's Tolle Grete bombard, fuze design, and the wounding power of the Lebel and Mosin rifles.
- An appreciation of three painters of the high mountains — Carlo Cressini (whose Helsenhorn and Alpe Veglia canvases open the article), Giuseppe Ciardi and Cesare Maggi — set against verses of Pascoli, Panzacchi, Carducci and Pastonchi and compared with Segantini and Emilio Longoni.
- A campaign against foreign and half-foreign words in Italian sport and commerce, from madapolam and gorgonzola to lawn-tennis (properly pallacorda), foot-ball, turf, pesage, pedigree, broken-down, dead heat, cravache, jockey and steeple-chase, citing the Touring's own four-language technical nomenclature in the Annuario.
- A picture page of the Associazione Studenti-Alpinisti's tented camp, named Tendopoli, pitched this year in the Cadore Dolomites instead of the Pennine, Graie or Retiche Alps, showing reveille, cooking and camp life.
- The Sette Comuni plateau north of Vicenza: its dying Cimbrian dialect, the thatched chimneyless houses of Asiago, Fogazzaro's villa La Montanina at Velo d'Astico, and the new narrow-gauge mountain railway that climbs from Thiene through Rocchette to the altipiano.
- The full fourteen articles of law 30 June 1912 N. 739 on motor traffic, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 1 August and in force from 16 August, with the Touring's account of on. Silvio Crespi's defence of motorists in the Chamber and sen. Di San Martino's Senate report.
- Concorso fotografico con mille lire di premi offerti dal Touring Club Italiano. (opens in a new tab)The T.C.I. offers 1000 lire in prizes, closing 30 November 1912, for photographs of forest and pastoral industries — timber felling and transport, charcoal, cellulose, tannin and resin works, mountain stock-rearing and fish farming — to illustrate the Commissione di Propaganda's third booklet, "Per il bosco e per il pascolo".
- A picture page announcing the Club Alpino Italiano's September excursion from Chatillon to Gressoney-St-Jean, with several hundred entrants, showing Monte Rosa, the Cervino and the two end points of the route.
- News photographs: the Italo-Turkish war at Misrata and Capo Zuara, shelled by the Umberto I's guns, and the death of Lt. aviator Manzini; the Geneva and Saint-Malo hydro-aeroplane contests (Bréguet, Deperdussin, Grandjean, Nieuport, Farman, Donnet-Lévêque); Russian military aviation at Sebastopol; and Boillot's Mont Ventoux climb.
- A photographic page of the monoplane Friuli on the Pordenone-Aviano raid, the Caproni presented to the army by the Società Italiana di Aviazione, the armoured Jacchia tested at Taliedo, the Malpensa military school machine, the Sphere hydroplane at Eastchurch, the Turin-built Chiribiri, and the airship Hansa's 710 km flight across Germany.
- The magazine's technical and commercial notes department, this month reviewing the Hupmobile engine and the Brown automatic tyre pump.
- The Hupmobile's long-stroke four-cylinder engine, rated only 16 HP in Italy on its small bore but developing 32 HP over its 140 mm stroke, is credited with the car's American success; the Italian agency is in Via Nazionale 4, Rome.
- The Brown pump screws into a spark-plug seat and uses the engine to inflate tyres with outside air drawn through its own valve, not exhaust gas; the Rome agency will send one on three days' trial, and readers are warned against poor-quality imitations that cannot exceed three atmospheres.
- The whole first edition of the twenty-four-volume "Capolavori della Letteratura Italiana" — Dante, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Manzoni, Leopardi and the rest — has sold out among Touring members, and the Istituto Editoriale Italiano repeats its offer of the set at L. 48 payable in monthly instalments of L. 4.
- The Rivista's monthly information department, gathering short reports under the headings Aereologia, Aeronautica, Alpinismo, Automobilismo, Aviazione, Ferrovie, Geografia, Geologia, Strade and Legale.
- The international kite competition held at Spa in August, with over 15,000 lire in prizes for scientific and military kites, and an argument that Italy — with only the Pavia and Vigna di Valle observatories flying them — should take up kite work for sounding, photography and life-line throwing.
- Night voyages by the French airships Clément-Bayard III (16½ hours over Paris, Nantes, Dieppe and Rouen) and Condé; a Berliner Verein free-balloon contest; French balloon statistics for the half-year; the international aeronautical map adopted at the Vienna congress; new Westphalian airship stations; and a military balloon park at Adrianople.
- The seventh S.U.C.A.I. congress, held at Tendopoli in the Alto Cadore on 15 August with deputy Loero and the Cadore, Agordino and Zoldano communes represented, which voted the Garrone motion for a commission to draw up a development plan for the Dolomite region.
- The French war ministry's 1912 lorry and tractor trials round Versailles; the Belgian Grand Prix at Dinant over 1452 km; Russian race results with Chorigine on Loreley, Valentin on Hispano-Suiza and Efront and Lepine on Lancia; the fuel-limited rules set for the 1913 A.C.F. Grand Prix; and the Mont Ventoux meeting won outright by Boillot's Peugeot in 17m 46s.
- The Touring has published a map of all Italian motor-bus lines in service, issued with the 1912 Annuario dell'Automobilismo, and lists newly opened services including Barge-Crissolo, Verona-Boscochiesanuova, Codogno-Crema, Poggio Mirteto-Rieti, Pordenone-Maniago and Primolano-Fonzaso-Primiero.
- A Russian officer's flight from Sebastopol to St Petersburg, Komberos's 43-minute Athens-Hydra crossing on a Farman float-plane, the British military trials at Larkhill, Guillaux's Paris-London flight by Caudron biplane, the Aéro-Cible Michelin bombing prizes won by Gaubert and the American Scott, and Legagneux's 124 km-in-an-hour record with a passenger.
- The suppression of level crossings on the Prussian railways — 3528 removed between 1899 and 1910 at a cost of 82 million marks — the far faster growth of tram traffic than of population in Dresden, Paris, Detroit and Milan, and progress on the Tripoli-Tagiura and Tripoli-Ain Zara lines in Tripolitania.
- The Mestre-Mirano tramway has been opened, and a royal decree approves the convention between the Ministry of Public Works and the mayor of Montepulciano for steam operation between Montepulciano Stazione and Montepulciano Città.
- Gaetano Platania's report on Etna's great September 1911 eruption, which foreshadowed the recent one: the glassy ash filaments and red vapour plume of January 1911 that earned it the name "fase hawaiana", the 6.5 km lava flow between Linguaglossa and Solicchiata, and the fourteen groups of vents mapped by Taffara.
- Fossil elephant tusks and molars found in the lignite of Leffe near Gandino in Val Seriana; the collapse on 29 February of the famous 270-tonne "piedra movediza" rocking stone of Sierra Tandil in Argentina; and the Gigantosaurus africanus and G. robustus skeletons excavated at Tendaguru in German East Africa.
- The Automobile Club de France's technical commission found the Dieppe circuit little damaged by racing, wheel-spin rather than speed or weight being the destroyer of macadam and antidérapants actually protecting the surface; also the opening of the Bellano-Taceno provincial road and the Longarone-Erto military road with its 120 m-high reinforced concrete bridge.
- Under article 2 of the new motor law the fee for testing a vehicle or examining a driver is fixed at L. 20 for cars and L. 10 for motorcycles; and the Ministry of Finance, after the Touring's memorandum on faulty tax-plate seals that were getting cyclists fined, has named a commission — with the Touring on it — to design a better fastening.
- Books presented to the Touring's library, among them Baedeker's Italie Méridionale, Sicile, Sardaigne (15th ed.), the Comune di Napoli's Annuario storico, the P.L.M.'s Le réseau des primeurs, the Lega Aerea Nazionale's Leonardo da Vinci e l'aviazione, and the Società Italiana Allievi Piloti Aviatori's lectures on aeroplane theory and construction.
- Corrects two errors in the previous number: the vertical and horizontal gun photographs on page 436 show the Déport and not the Krupp system, Italian artillery being about to receive 92 wholly Italian-built batteries of it; and in the Alessandria members' list Brusca Amedeo of Rivalta Bormida should read Brusasco Amedeo.
- June's draw among members who introduced a new member gave the gold medal to Angelo Comotti of Cernobbio and the silver medals to Adamo Bacini of Legnano and to signora Pellegrini Noerbel of Turin, drawn before the auditors.
- The year's recruiting rewards: an enamelled lapel pin for one new member; small silver, large silver and gold benemerenza medals at 10, 50 and 100 new members; a silver "Carta d'Italia" medal; monthly draws of seven gold and fourteen silver medals from June to December; and a choice of T.C.I. road or railway guides for two new members.
- Despatch state of the 1912 free publications: the Bari and Iglesias sheets of the Carta d'Italia are going out, followed by Sassari-Cagliari, Tempio Pausania-Foggia and Trento-Lecce; the Tripolitania and Cirenaica map and "Il bosco contro il torrente" are sent to every new member; and the Lazio regional guide is late because its compiler was mobilised to Libya.
- List of members who have taken out five-year subscriptions at L. 30 (L. 40 abroad), from Alghero, Bahia Blanca, Bellagio, Derna, Kiew, Rodi, San Paulo, Tripoli and elsewhere.
- List of the candidates who applied for membership of the T.C.I. between 1 and 31 July 1912, given first as life members — from Assunción, Buenos Aires, Capodistria, Lima, Lubiana and Tripoli among others — and then as annual members arranged by province and commune.