With yet another book from my own collection, this month we are taking a look at Primo Tiboldi's treatise La scherma di fioretto ('Foil fencing'). Originally published in 1905 by Sonzogno as part of their 'Biblioteca del Popolo' series, this booklet was repeatedly published over the next few decades, with my own copy being printed in January 1928.
Although a small booklet of only 62 pages, the method it contains is quite detailed for its length. It also bears a very close resemblance to the foil method of Luigi Barbasetti,1 with the rear-weighted guard and slight bend in the arm, moderate torso lean in the lunge, the inclusion of footwork such as the balestra, as well as various similarities in terminology.
Whether or not there was some amount of plagiarism involved on the part of Tiboldi, it is not unlikely that the fencing method he learnt was quite similar to Barbasetti's, given that Tiboldi learnt fencing under the Radaellian maestro Gaetano Garbagnati at the Circolo Ferruccio in Milan.2
The only mentions I have been able to find about Primo Tiboldi so far are mentions of his noteworthy tournament results in the 1890s and a couple of articles of his published in the fencing magazine Scherma Italiana, with the editor calling him a 'cultured and distinguished young man'.3
1 Luigi Barbasetti, La scherma di spada (Milan: A. Gattinoni, 1902).↩
2 Accademie, Tornei e Notizie, Scherma Italiana, 1 January 1894, 8.↩
3 Primo Tiboldi and Roderico Rizzotti, "Campionato di scherma annuale fra dilettanti milanesi," Scherma Italiana 16 July 1896, 26–7.↩
