La Scherma di Spada by Alberto Cougnet

Today I present to my readers a book from my own collection: La Scherma di Spada by the sports journalist and amateur fencer Alberto Cougnet. Published in 1894 in Reggio nell'Emilia, the text is an essay discussing the differences between the Italian and French schools of sword fencing. Below is a link to a PDF of this text.

Scans: https://drive.google.com/open?id=136AERUSSlbq0U_K53Mq53qRYsnm6hLY6

As may be seen on the title page, it seems that Cougnet was awarded a silver medal for this book at the Genoa Sports Competition in 1892.

Cougnet begins by discussing the origins of each school, then moving onto the differences between the weapons, the terminology, technical differences, and so on.

Whilst it does not provide much new insight to the modern reader on fencing of the time, it does present an interesting point of view on foil fencing in the last decade of the 19th century, not long before many of the distinguishing characteristics of each school began to gradually blur or disappear.