The large blade-swinging exercise of the Radaellian tradition known as the molinello (plural molinelli) has been commonly misunderstood by fencing commentators from the 1870s right up to the present day. The prescribed motion has been variously described by critics as slow, overly exaggerated, and easy to exploit—and indeed many of these comments are not necessarily false. What the comments ignore, however, are the practical applications of the wide motions and how they can be refined into tighter movements as the situation requires, with the elbow still remaining the primary pivot point.
Although this separation between exercise molinelli and practical or 'regular' molinelli may at times be understated in the Radaellian treatises, it is a distinction the authors make. In the first book on Radaelli's system by Settimo Del Frate, he defines the molinello in the following manner:
The molinello is the movement of rotation that the sabre does when striking. The exercise molinello is therefore nothing other than a somewhat exaggerated rotational movement of that which is done with the sabre in performing an ordinary blow, and they are exaggerated because they make the later blows with a regular molinello easier.… Once the student is confident and performs these three types of molinelli with precision, he will perform all sabre blows with the utmost ease, because they are all merely molinelli with a wider or smaller motion.1
Thus the molinello is simply a rotational movement pattern for a cut, and the exercise molinelli are a means to practise this movement pattern in an exaggerated manner in order to facilitate later learning. A good example of this is that the exercise molinelli contain within them positions which resemble certain parries, meaning that students are learning how to perform basic parry-riposte actions before being formally introduced to the concept.
Through the wide exercise molinelli, students learn not only how to move the sabre to and from every position, but also stop it wherever they want, which was a key attribute of the 'secure carriage' that the elbow-focused system was said to provide. Emphasis is also placed on giving the blow maximum reach and power, ending the action with correct edge alignment. As Giordano Rossi puts it, 'the more perfectly the circles are performed from the beginning of instruction, the lighter the sabre will seem, and the faster the blows with a regular molinello will be while staying well-directed, without imbalance in the hand, being ready for any other offensive or defensive action even after striking.'2 To help readers visualise how the molinelli can be reduced in size, Rossi provides some illustrations depicting three different paths that the hand can follow in the molinelli, providing examples for three out of the six molinelli.
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| Top left: molinello to the head from the left Top right: molinello to the face from the left Bottom: Rising molinello from the left |
This does not mean, however, that only the smaller movements are useful in fencing. In the parry-riposte, for example, a wide rotation is often necessary to free your blade from the opponent's and hit the most convenient target, as Rossi states:
The molinelli with wide rotation are very useful because, in addition to the aforementioned benefits, with them one obtains the actions that are performed in the bout; for example: if we from guard of second parry third and riposte to the opponent's inside flank, we perform the traversone with the exercise molinello. So too if we, from guard of second, parry first and riposte, we have thus performed the molinello with wide rotation.3
While the exaggerated weight-shifting and leaning in the exercise molinelli either disappear or decrease in amplitude in most Radaellian sources after Del Frate, this is less a repudiation of elbow molinelli than it is evidence of the system's refinement and the specialisation in an on-foot fencing context. This is in contrast to the system's origin as a cavalry system, where body movement must compensate for the inability to adjust the distance from an opponent through footwork. While Radaellian fencing treatises from the 1880s onward tended to de-emphasise weight shifting in the molinelli, it continued to be taught in the Italian cavalry until the early 1890s and was eventually reintroduced in 1912.4
The author who provides the clearest description of how the molinelli can be refined is Nicolò Bruno. In his framework, the motion of the molinello can be categorised as one of three 'circles', these being maximum, regular, and minimum. Maximum circles utilise full rotation of the forearm with accompanying movement of the upper arm, which is what the typical exercise molinelli entail. In minimum circles there is no raising or lowering of the upper arm, and the forearm 'turns on itself'. A 'regular' circle lies in between these extremes, with the elbow remaining stationary as the forearm rotates. This is the most common motion employed in the bout and in lessons.5
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| The description provided for fig. 27 on the right is: 'Molinello to the head from the left, starting from the guard or parry of 2nd or 1st in line, and demonstration of the maximum, regular, and minimum circle the sabre must describe. The same principles must serve as a basis for all other molinelli: that is, rising and to the face from the left, and rising and to the face from the right.' |
Bruno includes in his treatise a helpful illustration of the molinello to the head which is almost identical to the type we saw in Rossi's treatise; as a slight improvement on Rossi's, however, is the fact that in the description for the illustration we are told that each of the three circles, i.e. maximum, regular, and minimum, are being depicted.6
In each of these variations the elbow is always the most dominant joint utilised in the arm, but this should not come at the exclusion of sensible use of the wrist where appropriate. The most obviously useful movement of the wrist joint is ulnar deviation to bring the sabre in line with the forearm and radial deviation in the more angled parries.
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| An illustration of wrist flexion (left) and extension (right). |
Wrist movement was limited by the Radaellians so far as to ensure that the edge always travelled in the direction of the cut, as Salvatore Arista explains:
In the Radaelli sabre method, the pivot of rotation is indeed brought normally to the elbow, but it is not true that articulation of the wrist is totally abolished. In fact the wrist is well articulated starting with the blow to the head for the purpose of better finding the line and the target. The only inhibited movements are all the ineffectual or harmful movements of the wrist which cause the point to oscillate.7
These 'oscillations' are experienced when the blade flexes perpendicular to the direction of the sabre's path through the air, often as a result of wrist flexion or extension. Oscillations can serve as a feedback mechanism for the fencer, as they highlight when the edge is misaligned as it travels or if a force is being applied to the sabre that deviates it from the initial plane of motion. For Poggio Vannucchi, an otherwise very conservative Radaellian, this still allowed for wrist motion beyond the typical ulnar and radial deviation, saying that the sabre 'is wielded mainly through movement of the forearm and arm, with harmonious lateral and adduction movements of the hand, but never flexion.'8
With the end goal of the molinelli being to eliminate oscillations and ensure complete domination of the sabre, the precise size of the movement reduces to being only as wide as necessary to move from one place to another while avoiding obstacles such as the opponent's blade. Salvatore Pecoraro and Carlo Pessina seemingly take this to its logical conclusion when they state that as soon as the student has achieved the necessary blade control through the exercise molinelli, the rotations should 'be gradually reduced to the lowest limits, i.e. performing them with the simple turn of the hand accompanied by a slight bend and successive abrupt extension of the elbow.'9
Not all Radaellians agreed with this level of reduction, however, and Pecoraro and Pessina were criticised by their fellow Radaellian Ferdinando Masiello over this particular point. Although Masiello occasionally described cuts by molinello with terms like ristrettissimo, meaning 'very restricted' or 'very tight', at least by 1910 he was of the firm opinion that a molinello should only be a circular motion with a radius that corresponds to the length of the forearm plus sabre. In the first edition of his sabre treatise, Masiello allowed some use of wrist extension in executing the molinelli as well as ulnar and radial deviation, but from the 2nd edition onward this was changed to allow only deviation.10 Unhelpfully for our purposes, Luigi Barbasetti gives no clear indication of how or even if the molinello motion can be reduced, so he may or may not be in a similar camp as later Masiello.11
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| Molinello to the head from the left, from Sestini (1903). |
None of this is to say that some Radaellian authors allowed smaller cutting motions while others did not; these differences mainly come down to how they all defined the molinello specifically. Both Masiello and Barbasetti make extensive use of direct cuts in their methods, consisting of just a small bending of the forearm prior to extension along a linear path, and they also have the coupé. Rossi, Bruno, and Vannucchi, on the other hand, do not explicitly define their own version of a direct cut (although, as discussed previously, that does not mean they never used them), thus their interpretations of how a molinello can be performed may have been intended to help fill this terminological gap, which would also explain why the first two authors also give a broader definition of the coupé to allow cuts to other targets aside from just the head.
Even after explaining all this, a common refrain from critiques of Radaellian fencing is that no matter how tight one performs an elbow molinello, it always exposes the forearm to a stop cut. While this is true in a technical sense, it is very much overstated. This danger posed to an attacker using a molinello was not lost on the Radaellians; after all, how else would they have achieved the competitive success they did without knowing how to effectively compensate? The most important factor in avoiding stop hits, as in most techniques, is ensuring that one is not beginning the action too close to the opponent. One method the Radaellians used to ensure that their students were not advancing the body too early, thereby exposing the arm, was to give stop cuts to their arm or body as they lunged.12 If the cut is correctly timed, the blow to the arm should simply land on the student's hilt. Giordano Rossi expanded on this and also advocates attempting a sforzo on the student's blade to prompt the molinello; if the sforzo lands, then it shows the student that the beginning of their molinello was too slow.13
Correct decision-making is also something that the master must develop in their students. In a pure fencing sense, the molinelli are merely one way to move the blade from one position to another while avoiding all obstacles. They make the most tactical sense when beginning from an extended position with the blades engaged or with the arm in any position after completing a parry. The molinello allows a fencer to free their blade from or avoid entirely the opponent's blade and, in the same continuous motion, touch an exposed target. If nothing is in the way between one's blade and the desired target, then a direct cut or thrust will most often be the correct response.
The cult of Radaellianism has distinct principles that sets it apart from other sabre systems, but these principles should not be confused with religious dogma. Advocates of wrist-focused sabre systems can be quick to dismiss these principles, but doing so is a rather uncharitable way to engage with a tradition which saw widespread success at home and abroad for many decades.
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1 Settimo Del Frate, Istruzione per maneggio e scherma della sciabola (Florence: Tipografia, lit. e calc. la Venezia, 1868), 8.↩2 Giordano Rossi, Manuale teorico-pratico per la scherma di spada e sciabola con cenni storici sulle armi e sulla scherma e principali norme pel duello (Milan: Fratelli Dumolard Editori, 1885), 157.↩
3 Giordano Rossi, Considerazioni e proposte per l'unificazione dei vari sistemi di scherma in Italia (Milan: Tipografia degli Operai, 1890), 12.↩
4 For an exploration of this process, see my series The Parise-Pecoraro Method. The Radaellian cavalry method reintroduced in 1912 is found in Ministero della Guerra, Regolamento di esercizi per la cavalleria, vol. 1 (Rome: Voghera Enrico, 1912).↩
5 Nicolò Bruno, Risorgimento della vera scherma di sciabola italiana basata sull'oscillazione del pendolo (Novara: Tipografia Novarese, 1891), 59–60.↩
6 Bruno, 294.↩
7 Salvatore Arista, Del progresso della scherma in Italian; considerazioni sull'impianto della nuova Scuola Magistrale per l'esercito fondata in Roma nel 1884 (Bologna: Società Tipografica già Compositori, 1884), 22.↩
8 Poggio Vannucchi, I fondamenti della scherma italiana (Bologna: Coop. Tipografica Azzoguidi, 1915), 44.↩
9 Salvatore Pecoraro and Carlo Pessina, La Scherma di Sciabola: Trattato Teorico-Pratico (Viterbo: Tipografia G. Agnesotti, 1912), 53.↩
10 Ferdinando Masiello, La scherma italiana di spada e di sciabola (Florence: Stabilimento Tipografico G. Civelli, 1887). Note, however, that there is a curious contradiction in these latter editions. While in the section 'method of wielding the sabre' both flexion and extension are excluded, later on when defining the molinelli extension is instead permitted. It seems likely that the latter inclusion was an oversight in the editing process. Cf. Masiello La scherma di sciabola (Florence: R. Bemporad, 1902), 25, 55–6.↩
11 Luigi Barbasetti, Das Säbelfechten (Vienna: Verlag der Allgemeinen Sport-Zeitung, 1899).↩
12 Stated in the handwritten notes of the personal textbooks of Luigi Barbasetti and Giovanni Lombardi under the heading 'Molinelli con spaccata'. The first manuscript is found in the KU Leuven Libraries Special Collections, R4A552b, and the latter is in Museo Silvio Longhi at the Agorà della Scherma in Busto Arsizio, Italy. See here for transcriptions of both.↩
13 Rossi, Manuale teorico-pratico, 176; Rossi, Considerazioni e proposte, 12–3.↩