Italian foil blade length in the 19th century

Foil fencing equipment from Enrichetti (1871).
Source: KU Leuven

When comparing a French and Italian foil as they are commonly made today, it is solely the hilt which differentiates them. Until the turn of the 20th century, however, many considered blade length to be another key differentiating feature for both schools, with the Italians said to prefer the longer variety. How significant an effect these differing preferences alone had on the fencing is an interesting topic in itself, but for this particular study I will be focusing solely on determining exactly what blade lengths were used and recommended in Italy during the 19th century. The majority of this information comes to us now through fencing treatises, which cannot always be assumed to reflect the opinions of most fencers at the time. They are nevertheless often indicative of what experienced practitioners considered ideal in a doctrinal or traditional sense.

Before consulting the treatises, it is worth first providing a reference frame for readers so that any subsequent comparisons can be put into context. Today in Olympic fencing, as regulated by the International Fencing Federation (FIE), blade length from guard to point cannot not exceed 90 cm.¹ Foil blades at or near enough to this limit are now ubiquitous among adult fencers in competitions. This largest size blade is known as a size 5 blade; the modern blade size numbering was popularised by the French, and is now based off British imperial inches. A size 5 blade measures around 35.4 inches (89.9 cm), and each smaller size takes off one inch, so a size 4 blade is 34.4 inches (87.6 cm), all the way down to size 0, which is 30.4 inches or 77.5 cm.² These smaller sizes are mainly reserved for children today.

Foil dimensions for international competitions
Source: fie.org

Prior to the 19th century, if we are lucky enough to find an author stating their preferred blade or sword length, it will most often be given relative to the individual's height. A good example is Paolo Bertelli's treatise from 1800, where he states that a proportionate blade length is one that comes up to the height of the belt, i.e. the natural waist.³ Helpfully for us though, from this point onward specific measurements become the norm, starting with Rosaroll and Grisetti in 1803. While they do clarify that the blade should be proportional to the wielder, Neapolitans and Sicilians supposedly prefer the longest blades of all the Italian peoples at 4 palmi or 105.5 cm, which is what they say is customary in duelling; throughout the rest of the peninsula shorter blades of 3 ½ to 3 ⅔ palmi (92.6 to 97 cm) are more common.⁴ It is possible these measurements include the ricasso, so if we subtract a typical ricasso length of 5 cm that would leave the Neapolitans with roughly 100 cm of blade from guard to point, and 87 to 92 cm for the rest of Italy.

The scarcity of sources in decades following Rosaroll and Grisetti's publication makes it difficult to verify how broadly their preferences may be applied to their own camp, but they were a convenient enough reference point four decades later for Alberto Marchionni to use as an upper limit on the blade lengths used by Italians. In giving advice to the reader on what kind of foil blades to use in both lessons and bouting, he remarks that the length of foil blades at that time can vary anywhere between 28 and 33 pollici. We can get a rough idea of what Marchionni's pollice is equivalent to in centimetres from earlier in the book where he equates 29 pollici to 85 cm and 30 pollici to 90 cm, which reveals that 1 pollice is equivalent to just under 3 cm, making his range of blade lengths in the area of 84 to 99 cm. Marchionni himself recommends a mid-length blade at 31 pollici or ~93 cm.⁵ Since the type of foil used in Marchionni's system is of the 'mixed school' type—which lacks the ricasso of the Neapolitan foil—it might be assumed that all the provided figures refer to only the length of blade between the guard and point, in which case these figures would line up very well with those given by Rosaroll and Grisetti.

The reason why northerners were more partial to shorter blades was directly related to the prevalence of the mixed school, which incorporated both traditional Italian and French techniques into one method.⁶ Since some aspects of French fencing, in particular those techniques used at close measure, were less viable with longer blades, especially when using a ligature, proponents of the mixed school shied away from the upper limit of blade lengths purely out of practicality. A mid-range blade did not put one at too much of a disadvantage against a long Neapolitan blade, but gave an advantage against them at close measure as well as a reach advantage over the average French practitioner (who preferred blades on the shorter end of the scale, as discussed later). Southerners, on the other hand, whose long blades made their weapons heavier and more unwieldy, commonly made use of ligatures to mitigate this.⁷ As always in fencing, the weapon could be both a determiner of and determined by the method its wielder used.

With very few exceptions, Italian sources from this point on favour similar mid-range blade lengths as what Marchionni recommends. Beginning with Paolo De Scalzi's treatise in the early 1850s, we find a simple way for a fencer to determine whether nor a sword or foil is correctly proportional for their height. Standing upright, the fencer collapses their sword arm and places the palm of that hand on the same shoulder, keeping the elbow pointing towards the ground. Resting the point of the sword on the ground underneath that same arm, the pommel of the sword should lightly touch the folded elbow.⁸ This method of measuring a proportional sword length can also be found in two treatises on duelling written by fencing masters, the first one co-authored by the aforementioned Alberto Marchionni along with Cesare Enrichetti published in 1863, and the other by Pasquale Cicirelli in 1873.⁹ The first treatise states that this measurement applies to both duelling swords and foils, and in both texts this measuring technique is specifically said to correspond to a proportionate Italian sword. Given that the average height of Italian adult men born in the mid-19th century could be lower than 165 cm, depending on which region one was born in, such a method would probably yield a blade length on the lower end of range Marchionni gave in his 1847 fencing treatise.¹⁰

De Scalzi even provides a quick rule-of-thumb to estimate this correct length, saying that a correctly proportioned sword, using the above method, should end up being 3/5 of one's total height.¹¹ For a 165 cm person De Scalzi's rule-of-thumb means a correctly proportioned sword would be about 99 cm, leaving a blade length from point to guard of around 84 cm if the sword had a ricasso, as they do in De Scalzi's illustrations. This is particularly interesting in Cicirelli's case, since at the time of publishing he was teaching in Reggio Calabria, a city deep within Southern Italy. He also provides a maximum allowable length for a duelling sword, 'not exceeding four palmi (1.06 m) from the pommel to the point.'¹² While this 'four palmi' measurement is familiar to use from Rosaroll and Grisetti, and the unit conversion to metric which Cicirelli provides is certainly nice confirmation for my own, it is important to note how it is now being used to refer to the total length of the sword, not just the blade, as Rosaroll and Grisetti did.

Returning to the north of the peninsula, masters Vittorio Lambertini and Cesare Enrichetti, who published their respective treatises within a year of each other at the start of the 1870s, echo the intermediate preferences outlined first by Rosaroll/Grisetti and Marchionni, and this may reflect the early stages of a narrowing range of blade lengths. The former recommends a blade between 90 and 100 cm long from point to incassatura (probably where the blade meets the shell) and states a preference for long blades, while the latter splits the difference and recommends 95 cm, not including the ricasso. In a discussion earlier in his treatise, Enrichetti declares that while in fencing different blade lengths between opponents is permissible, this is not so for a duel, in which a 'correct length' would be an average of the Neapolitan/Sicilian school, who use 'not less than 4 palmi', and the French, whose blades 'do not exceed 3 palmi [79 cm]'.¹³

Before going any further, this a good opportunity for a brief tangent regarding French foil blades, since they commonly served as a lower-end reference point for Italian authors throughout the 19th century. Compared to the ranges we have seen earlier on in Italy, French treatises generally agreed on a relatively narrow range of 80 to 90 cm, as seen in the table below.¹⁴ While this data does support the assertion that the French did prefer shorter blades than Italians in general, Enrichetti was likely exaggerating the reality.

Author	Blade Length
Saint Martin 1804	2.5 French feet [81.2 cm]
Chatelain 1818	30 to 32 pouces [80.6 to 86 cm]
La Boëssière 1818	at least 31 pouces [84 cm]
Gomard 1845	varies from 81 to 89 cm
Brunet 1884	no. 4 [84 cm] and no. 5 [88 cm] blades are most common

In the following decade and a half, the disparity between Italian and French blades would diminish even further, converging towards a relatively narrow range by the end of the century. The first appearance of what would quickly become the new normal in Italy was in the treatise of Masaniello Parise, the young Neapolitan who was placed at the head of the Military Fencing Master's School in Rome when it opened in 1884, the same year his treatise was published. Parise provides no range of typical blade lengths, just a single number: 'The length of this blade, calculated from the shell to the point or button, should be 90 centimetres.'¹⁵ Even including the 6 cm long ricasso, we are still about 10 cm off the 4 palmi measurement which Enrichetti gave as a supposed lower limit for Neapolitans just a decade earlier.

Given that the government approval of Parise's treatise was seen by many to be a return to tradition, we would expect the Neapolitan Parise to have preferred longer blades, but his prescribed 90 cm is much more akin to the compromise blade lengths seen in the north during the preceding decades. Nor do we find any of his critics, of which there were many, bringing up blade length as a point of contention, even when the state of Italian fencing in the late 1890s was described by one particularly virulent opponent as a 'Frenchified mess' thanks to Parise's efforts to modernise the old Neapolitan school.¹⁶ The cultural dominance of the north post-unification may go a long way to explain the shift in Neapolitan preferences in the latter half of the century. Longer blades may also have just become harder to come by, since most fencing blades towards the end of the century were from foreign manufacturers who no longer wishes to cater for a niche market. Whatever the reason for this change, by the 1880s it was evidently not considered important enough for either Parise's supporters or detractors to mention.

Further evidence that Parise was simply reflecting the common preference of the time can be taken from the fact that even two of his fiercest ideological opponents, Radaellians, soon published their own treatises also prescribing 90 cm blades. First was Giordano Rossi in 1885, who also clarified the blade should be 95 cm including the ricasso and the overall sword length 106 cm.¹⁷ Second was Ferdinando Masiello in 1887, who himself started out his foil fencing education under Neapolitan masters before later studying under Enrichetti and Radaelli. His excruciatingly detailed foil specifications produce a weapon that is 108 cm long in total and with a centre of gravity only 4 cm from the guard, as opposed to the typical 'four fingers' preferred by Rossi.¹⁸

The parts of a foil, from Masiello (1887).
Source: KU Leuven

The outlier for the 1880s comes from the only other treatise published in this decade, written by Sicilian master Antonino Guglielmo. He makes suspiciously similar remarks as Enrichetti regarding how Neapolitans and Sicilians do not use blades shorter than 105 cm and the French no longer than 80 cm, both being roughly equivalent to 4 and 3 palmi, respectively.¹⁹ Given that Guglielmo was not averse to plagiarising parts of several other Italian authors throughout his book, such as Settimo Del Frate, Giuseppe Cerri and unsurprisingly Giuseppe Rosaroll and Pietro Grisetti (leaning particularly heavily on the latter two in his section on foil), he may have simply been out-of-touch with contemporary practice and relying mostly on his readings.

Also beginning in the 1880s was an increasing amount cooperation and competition between Italian and French fencers, such that by the end of the century it is easy to find commentators comparing both the stylistic and materialistic tendencies of the two countries. The frequent interaction between the schools may be one of the key reasons why we also see the common blade lengths used by the two schools converge to within only a few centimetres by the late 1890s. Italian sports journalist Alberto Cougnet noted in 1894 that Italian blades were 90 cm from point to guard, with a typical ricasso of 5 or 6 cm, whilst the blade on a French foil was 87 cm, 'therefore it has three centimetres less than our Italian blades.'²⁰ Similarly, French military master Émile Coste's analysis of Italian fencing, relying heavily on Masaniello Parise's work, remarked that the 90 cm blade of Italians was 'longer than ours by four to five centimetres', and that Italian blades were also flatter and much more flexible, which gave their masters the advantage of not having to use a plastron when giving a lesson.²¹ This is a notable change from the 'long heavy blade, broad and perfectly rigid' that Baron de Bazancourt described on Italian foils less than four decades earlier.²²

A poster promoting the first Franco-Italian team foil
tournament in 1895.
Source: Gallica

So while the difference in blade lengths was noteworthy for commentators of both countries by 1890s, it was by no means as considerable as it apparently was in the middle of the century, yet this difference still seems to have been too much for some. At the very first Olympic games in 1896, the questionably-worded rules targeted Italianate fencers with the rule that those who chose to use an Italian foil 'may only use foils measuring less than 0.85 centimetres', which I can only presume meant a maximum blade length of 85 cm rather than mandating 9 cm foils.²³ This measure proved unnecessary in the end, as not a single Italian fencer ended up competing.

Subsequent foil competitions were much more accommodating though, with the Paris games in 1900 and Athens in 1906 mandating no. 5 blades, which by that point were likely very close or equivalent to 90 cm, and then at Stockholm 1912 the maximum blade length was explicitly set at 90 cm, with a maximum total weapon length of 110 cm.²⁴ This seems to have been the maximum length that the International Fencing Federation decided on for both foil and épée when it approved its first regulations in 1914, which is still the upper limit to this day.²⁵ This convergence was an inevitable effect of international competition and the agreements which arose to standardise such encounters. Since the French and Italian schools were the two most prominent at the time of the FIE's founding, as well as already using blades that were relatively similar in length, it is natural that they were the one who determined what should be considered acceptable, and it just so happened that by the time a decision had to be made, they were more or less in agreement over most of the general points.

So to summarise the trajectory we can observe in Italian foil fencing across the 19th century, the upper end of Italian blade lengths was set by the traditional fencers of Southern Italy at around 100 or 105 cm long. These were likely in common usage until the second half of the century, where they were slowly replaced by shorter and shorter blades until settling on 90 cm, probably by the late 1870s. In the north of the peninsula, a diversity of blade lengths matched the diversity of opinions and influences, most notably from the French. In the first half of the century, blades anywhere from 80 cm to the Neapolitan 105 cm could be found in use, but as the century wore on, particularly after unification, northerners gravitated towards the middle ground of 90 to 95 cm, and then eventually 90 cm during the 1870s. There are of course significant gaps and uncertainties left in this time, most notably regarding the practices of the Neapolitan school and its interactions with fencers from the north, so the conclusions I have been able to draw together here should only be considered a broad starting point for the evolution of the modern Italian foil blade.

*******

1 The most recent equipment rules from the FIE can be found here.^↩
2 Ben Paul, "Choosing the Right Size of Blade: A Simplified Guide," Leon Paul, 19 December 2023, https://www.leonpaul.com/blog/choosing-the-right-size-of-blade-a-simplified-guide/.^↩
3 Paolo Bertelli, Trattato di scherma ossia modo di maneggiare la spada e sciabla (Bologna: Ulisse Ramponi, 1800), 53.^↩
4 Giuseppe Rosaroll and Pietro Grisetti, La scienza della scherma (Milan: Giornale Italico, 1803), 4. For the conversion of palmi to centimetres, I have referenced Tavole dei pesi e delle misure già in uso nelle varie proncie del regno col peso metrico decimale (Rome: Stamperia Reale, 1877), 447. I have assumed that the authors were using Neapolitan palmi.^↩
5 Alberto Marchionni, Trattato di scherma sopra un nuovo sistema di giuoco misto di scuola italiana e francese (Florence: Tipi di Federigo Bencini, 1847), 143; 187.^↩
6 Marchionni, Trattato di scherma, 62.^↩
7 For a discussion on the use of ligatures, see Sebastian Seager, "Binding the Sword," Radaellian Scholar (blog), 18 August 2024, https://radaellianscholar.blogspot.com/2024/08/binding-sword.html.^↩
8 Paolo De Scalzi, La scuola della spada, 2nd ed. (Genoa: Tipografia e Litografia di L. Pellas, 1853), 26.^↩
9 Alberto Marchionni and Cesare Errichetti, Norme sui duelli e attribuzioni dei padrini (Florence: Tipografia di P. Fioretti, 1863), 18; Pasquale Cicirelli, Riflessioni sul duello seguite dalle norme per l'esecuzione pratica dello stesso e doveri del giurì d'onore (Reggio Calabria: Lipari e Barile, 1873), 52.^↩
10 Maria Enrica Danubio, Elisa Amicone, and Rita Vargiu, "Height and BMI of Italian immigrants to the USA, 1908–1970," Economics & Human Biology 3, no. 1 (March 2005): 33–43, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2004.11.001; Brian A'Hearn, Franco Peracchi, and Giovanni Vecchi, "Height and the Normal Distribution: Evidence from Italian Military Data," Demography 46, no. 1 (February 2009): 1–25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25476004.^↩
11 De Scalzi, La scuola della spada, 26.^↩
12 Cicirelli, Riflessioni sul duello, 52n.^↩
13 Vittorio Lambertini, Trattato di scherma teorico-pratico illustrato della moderna scuola italiana di spada e sciabola (Bologna: self-pub., 1870), 28; Cesare Enrichetti, Trattato elementare teorico-pratico di scherma (Parma: Pietro Grazioli, 1871), 29–30; 62.^↩
14 J. de St. Martin, L'art de faire des armes réduit a ses vrais principes, (Vienna: Janne Schrämble, 1804), 4; Chatelain, Traité d'escrime a pied et a cheval (Paris: Magimel, Anselin et Pochard, 1818), 13; La Boëssière, Traité de l'art des armes, a l'usage des professeurs et des amateurs (Paris: Imprimerie de Didot, 1818), 13; Gomard [A. J. J. Possellier], La théorie de l'escrime enseignée par une méthode simple basée sur l'observation de la nature (Paris: J. Dumaine, 1845), 302–3; Romuald Brunet, Traité d'escrime: pointe et contre-pointe (Paris: Rouveyre et G. Blond, 1884, 21.^↩
15 Masaniello Parise, Trattato teorico pratico della scherma di spada e sciabola: preceduto da un cenno storico sulla scherma e sul duello (Rome: Tipografia Nazionale, 1884), 34.^↩
16 Luigi Barbasetti, "La miglior parata è la botta," La Gazzetta dello Sport, 20 August 1897.^↩
17 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), 24.^↩
18 Ferdinando Masiello, La scherma italiana di spada e di sciabola (Florence: Stabilimento Tipografico G. Civelli, 1887), 174–6. The preference of a 'four fingers' centre of gravity on foils was shared by the aforecited Lambertini, Enrichetti, Parise, and Rossi.^↩
19 Antonino Guglielmo, Sunto ed innovazioni sulla scherma di spada e di sciabola (Messina: Tipi Caporal Fracassa, 1888), 7–9.^↩
20 Alberto Cougnet, La scherma di spada (nel metodo italiano e francese) (Reggio Nell'Emilia: G. Degani, 1894), 38–41.^↩
21 Émile Coste, Fleurets rompus... ([Paris]: R. Chapelot, 1899), 260–2.^↩
22 Baron de Bazancourt, Secrets of the Sword, trans. C. F. Clay (London: George Bell, 1900), 168.^↩
23 Jeux olympiques Athènes 5-15 avril 1896: sous la présidence de monseigneur le prince royal de Grece: Règlement du championnat international d'escrime (n.p.: [1896?]), 8.^↩
24 D. Mérillon, Exposition universelle internationale de 1900 à Paris: Concours internationaux d'exercices physiques et de sports, vol. 1 (Parisç Imprimerie Nationale, 1901), 144; Jeux olympiques internationaux a Athènes (22 Avril - 2 Mai 1906): Réglements: Première partie: Sports athlètiques, gymnastique, escrime, foot-ball, lawn-tennis (Athens: 1905), 35; Erik Bergvall, ed., The Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912, trans. Edward Adams-Ray (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1913), 1017.^↩
25 The earliest full set of FIE regulations I have found so far was published across several issues of the magazine L'Escrime et le Tir, from February to July 1923.^↩