The publication of Masiello's booklet of criticism marked the climax of the debate surrounding Pecoraro and Pessina's sabre treatise. As we already saw with Alberto Cavaciocchi's reply to Masiello, public discussion began to focus more on the people making the arguments against Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise rather than the text itself. News of the treatise's imminent approval by the Ministry of War (and a possible second edition in the works) likely made the adoption of the new system seem like a fait accompli even to those who deemed it inadequate, at least in its current state.
In line with this state of affairs, Radaellian master Poggio Vannucchi decided to take up his pen to denounce the new official system as well as the general trend of Italian fencing. Below is the full translation of an article of his published on 14 March 1911 in the Bolognese newspaper Il Resto del Carlino. Note that the incident he is referring to at the beginning was a recent public dispute between Agesilao Greco and Jean Joseph Renaud following a fencing exhibition in Paris. The dispute eventually ended in a duel between the latter and Italian journalist Luigi Campolonghi.
If the recent Italo-French fencing dispute has ended in a not-too-dishonourable way for the Italian nation, and this is thanks to the intervention of those who dared drop the pen for the sword to protect our honour, we must also confess that this dispute ended deplorably for our Italian fencing; it was a true disaster.
This is not to rekindle controversies which we should instead all wish to be over and hope, unfortunately in vain, for them to be soon buried in oblivion. It is not even to criticise the chivalrous behaviour of our champions that I wish to make my voice heard here; the whole nation and the entire civil world was the judge of that behaviour.
It is only technical deficiency that I intend to speak of—our lack of preparation, the inferiority, it must be admitted, in which we find ourselves. And we can admit this, because it is not an inferiority of race or of traditions, but of systems, an inferiority which depends not on less aptitude, but of less seriousness in preparation and practice.
I will mention nothing else, because too much has already been written rightly or wrongly and even when it was better to be silent.
What the current state of our fencing is, that professed officially at the Rome Master's School, in institutes and military corps, and unfortunately even on the pistes of international tournaments, what this fencing is, I have already discussed on another occasion in the columns of this same newspaper.
I said then that one of its fundamental principles is the laziness which the lunge in the Neapolitan style teaches, more resembling a comfortable sitting-down than the sudden burst that it should be and which, according to them, allows one to return to guard more comfortably. And this laziness introduces a whole arsenal of small tricks, deceptions, games; gimmicks like rattling, somersaults, and mean ploys; intentionally provoked double touches to strike fraudulently where one cannot strike with art; parries done no longer with the blade, but with the body, if necessary turning the back or exposing another part of the body where blows are not conventionally valid.
And I also said that instead our true fencing—that with which Radaelli made the best Italian fencers in a single year—is fatiguing and gruelling, with neither economy nor respite, because only in this way can the necessary performance of the body's capacity and the harmony of movements and volition be achieved.
A few minutes, I added, of strict instruction on the piste should be enough to exhaust the keen pupil, who fully intends to gain the necessary requirements; far better than hours and hours of continuous teasing, whipping, charming jumps, and back turns. And with this exercise it is possible to implement that system which is one of our forgotten glories, which is based on the absolute precedence of the blade over the body so that those who strike in a truly sudden manner, without having warned the opponent with the body, should touch; the other cannot parry, even if they know where the other wants to strike, even if a simple and brief movement is enough to parry; they cannot parry if the opponent had a good start, simply because they had a good start.
This requirement of the blow is something very arduous to achieve; it requires effort and constancy, enthusiasm and sacrifice, but it is only this which can ensure supremacy for Italian fencing.
I would like to again recall that I twice gave an open invitation to a practical test of this fundamental principle, a test which I still propose in the same terms: to lunge from defined guard positions against a declared target, without a preceding movement or feint to deceive the opponent, at correct measure, committing myself to touching the opponent at least six times out of ten and parrying at least the same number of their blows. And perhaps this time too I will wait in vain.
But to return to our current thesis and conclude: throw into oblivion this disgrace that we call the current official Italian fencing system, that which is the cause of our defeats and our embarrassments, and exhume our old, true fencing; because when the system is serious, so too is the behaviour of those who profess it and represent the Italian name in trials of arms held before the entire civil world.Cap. Poggio VannucchiFencing master
Vannucchi does not name Pecoraro and Pessina explicitly, but it was well known by then (at least among fencing enthusiasts) that the two masters had taken over direction of the Master's School, and his reference to the 'lunge in the Neapolitan style' would be universally understood as the type with an upright torso that was typical of Neapolitan fencers. This body carriage is typical of the supposed weakness Vannucchi sees in fencing of the period, which had strayed too far from the 'fatiguing and gruelling' style of the Radaellian of his younger years in the 1870s and early 80s. For those of you who have read Vannucchi's 1915 treatise, the above article might seem rather familiar, as the majority of it is in fact repeated verbatim in his treatise's introduction.1 One may note the removal of the reference to the Master's School, as by 1915 it had been closed as part of the country's war preparations and could no longer be blamed for any perceived degradation in the nation's fencing.
In the meantime, Masiello did eventually become aware of Alberto Cavaciocchi's article in Rivista Militare, but after reading it he did not deem the technical arguments to be of a high enough standard to warrant a full rebuttal. Nevertheless two of Cavaciocchi's personal attacks against him did justify a reply, which appeared in La Nazione on 16 April 1911. After accusing Cavaciocchi of being uncourteous by not informing him of the Rivista Militare article's publication, as Masiello assures he always does when replying to others, he first takes issue with Cavaciocchi's claim that Masaniello Parise's attempt to conciliate the opposing factions in Italy around the year 1889 only ended in vain thanks to the 'intransigence of a few'. Masiello informs him that there were in fact two such attempts, and that if anyone present at those meetings should be accused of intransigence, then it should be Parise himself. Masiello quotes a letter he had received a few days earlier from Salvatore Arista, who said that at one of these meetings, during a discussion on how the disengagement should be executed, Parise dismissively stated 'let's not go into useless details'. For Masiello, such a statement was demonstrative of how disingenuous Parise's engagement was with his critics, and how futile such attempts at conciliation were from the outset.
The second exception Masiello took with Cavaciocchi's article is when the latter brought up an exhibition which Masiello took part in at the National Academy of Fencing in Naples in 1880. Aside from the fact that Cavaciocchi misremembered the year the event actually happened (1882) and falsely called the event was 'competition' rather than simply an exhibition, he also claimed that when Masiello appeared to be losing to his clearly superior Neapolitan opponents he pulled out of the event, claiming that the pain in his knee had become too great to continue. As Masiello rightly points out, he had in fact been suffering significant knee pain at the time which was increasingly preventing him from fencing, such that in 1881 he even underwent a meniscectomy to remedy this pain, which was the first time such a procedure had been performed in Italy.2 Masiello concludes his short article by assuring Cavaciocchi and all those who had been subject to his criticism that he has no intention of dethroning or defaming anyone, but simply to speak the truth as he sees it for the benefit of fencing. He also declares that he has too high an opinion of his own system for it to be adopted at the Master's School, where, with an explicit nod of approval to Vannucchi's article, they follow methods 'based on laziness'.
The final publication to directly contribute to this debate (that I am aware of at least) was a booklet titled Poche parole "Sui metodi di scherma per l'esercito" del Colonnello di fanteria E. Cavaciocchi written by a Florentine amateur named Giovanni Dumortier. Dated to May 1911, the booklet is a direct rebuttal of Cavaciocchi's article, with Dumortier emulating his witty and occasionally condescending tone. Given that the booklet was published in Florence, it is possible that Dumortier was a student or acquaintance of Masiello, and felt compelled to defend his friend. Since Cavaciocchi spent a significant portion of his article comparing Parise's system with the Radaelli and Masiello's, Dumortier's booklet is almost entirely occupied with refuting these points and defending the legacy of the Radaellians.
Those who are interested in the specifics of the argumentation should read the booklet themselves, but the most pertinent point to the overall debate regarding Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise is in Dumortier's conclusion, where he admits that he is quite certain the new system will be approved by the military. This, he claims, is not because the system is revolutionary or altogether different from what came before, but precisely because this is the exact kind of sabre fencing that had been taught at the Master's School for the past 25 years: a mixed style which disregarded the official status of Parise's method. While there is good evidence to suggest that practical instruction at the school often diverged from the official curriculum, Dumortier is probably exaggerating the true extent of this practice.
It is here that the great controversy of Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise finally subsided, likely to the great relief of the embattled authors as well as the general fencing public. While the 1912 revised edition improved many of the flaws that the book was accused of possessing, it never quite reached the same semi-legendary status as Parise's treatise. A large part of this can be attributed to the fact that, unlike Parise's treatise, Pecoraro and Pessina's text did not enjoy three straight decades of use at the Master's School, as the school was closed only few years later at the outset of the First World War. However, the treatise did re-emerge in the 1920s when the school was reopened under Mussolini's fascist government, which prompted a reprinting of Pecoraro and Pessina's sabre and épée treatises (as well as Parise's foil section) exclusively for students of the school. Over the following decades various authors throughout Europe considered the book authoritative enough to cite or sometimes even plagiarise in their own works, and when Giorgio Pessina (Carlo's son) and Ugo Pignotti were tasked with writing a new sabre textbook for the Italian Fencing Federation in the 1960s, they too drew inspiration from Pecoraro and Pessina, preserving their molinelli and preliminary exercises more or less unaltered and making extensive use of their terminology throughout.3
Returning now to 1911, when the treatise's legacy was still unwritten (and indeed there is much more that can be said about said legacy), we do find at least one old-school Radaellian who saw the publication of Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise in a rather positive light. Egidio Candiani was a graduate of the Milan Master's School under Radaelli and later spent some of his career as an assistant instructor at the Rome Master's School under Parise. In November 1911, as the fencing masters of the military were being called to the Master's School to learn the new Radaellian method, Candiani expressed his hope that Pecoraro and Pessina's leadership would return Italian sabre fencing onto the bright path it had once followed. I will end here and let Candiani speak for himself.
Radaelli resurgit!
It is not well established if the bones of the dead shiver under the earth, but if this is true, those of the late great master Giuseppe Radaelli should now be trembling with joy to know that his glorious sabre system has now again been adopted at the Rome Fencing Master's School.Yes, Radaelli resurgit!, and he is resurrected thanks to the approval of the new sabre treatise compiled by the talented masters Pecoraro and Pessina, the former the director and latter vice-director of said school.This is because, with all due respect to the valiant authors, their treatise approved by the Ministry of War as the official text is only a return to the old—or, to say it better, the revindication of the Radaellian system, unjustly condemned to ostracism by the late Masaniello Parise who was appointed supreme director of the Rome Master's School in 1884.Parise, who was undoubtedly a profound theoretician of fencing, as well as a much appreciated fencing master, having dedicated all his intelligence and care to his preferred weapon, the sword, he was neither willing nor able to also deploy the same rare talent and ability on the sabre, which had instead found in Radaelli a marvellous and unsurpassed master.Fencers with the enviable fortune of having fewer years under their belts—lucky them!—cannot remember the long, relentless, implacable campaign waged before and after the death of poor Radaelli in order to demolish his system, which had given Italy its best and strongest fencers. It will suffice to recall of that glorious host the names Ronca, Roggia, Cavalli, Arzani, Vezzani, Pecoraro, Guasti, Giordano Rossi, Varrone, Pessina, Sartori, Barbasetti, Gallanzi, Tagliaferri, and many others, adding to these world-famous masters a pleiad of formidable amateurs of the time such as Magrini, Burba, Scansi, Sestini, Santagalli, Baldi, Santoponte, Ceccherini, Pinelli, Giurovick, etc.So there is something to be pleased with and rejoice over in the valorous Pecoraro and Pessina, authors of the new sabre treatise, if thanks to them the Rome Master's School is officially teaching that abhorred sabre system which, like it or not, throughout the fencing world has always been considered the best.To learn the Radaelli sabre system, revised and corrected by Pecoraro and Pessina, all civil and military masters belonging to the various institutes and corps subordinate to the Ministry of War are now called to Rome, divided into groups for a course of 15 days.This course has already been completed by the civil masters who all have words of high praise for the clear and rational method by which professors Pecoraro and Pessina expound their treatise theoretically and practically. The masters raise a true hymn of gratitude and esteem to the commander of the Rome Master's School—who is the distinguished artillery colonel Cav. Salonna, a passionate and talented fencer as well as a fervent apostle of the Radaelli system—for the welcome he gave on their arrival at the Master's School.At the completion of the course there was a banquet for all the masters called to Rome and the instructors of the Master's School. As a pleasant memento, Colonel Salonna wished for a group photo of all the masters attending the fraternal symposium.E. C.4
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1 Poggio Vannucchi, I fondamenti della scherma italiana (Bologna: Coop. Tipografia Azzoguidi, 1915).↩2 The full context of this operation has been helpfully summarised in Nunzio Spina, "La prima meniscectomia in Italia: storia di armi, di coraggio e di felici intuizioni," Giornale Italiano di Ortopedia e Traumatologia 34, no. 2 (June 2008): 90-96, https://old.giot.it/article/la-prima-meniscectomia-in-italia-storia-di-armi-di-coraggio-e-di-felici-intuizioni/.↩
3 Giorgio Pessina and Ugo Pignotti, La sciabola (Rome: Scuola Centrale dello Sport, [1972?]. For a blatant example of plagiarism, see Federico Ynglés Sellés, Tratado teórico-prático de esgrima. Segunda Parte. Sable (Toledo: Editorial Católica Toledana, 1944).↩
4 Egidio Candiani, "Il nuovo sistema di sciabola adottato presso la Scuola Magistrale Militare di Roma," La Stampa Sportiva, 5 November 1911, 5, https://www.byterfly.eu/islandora/object/libria:42583#page/5/mode/1up. The photo Candiani refers to at the very end was not included in the original article, but can be found in Eduardo De Simone, La Scuola Magistrale Militare di Scherma. Dalla sua fondazione in Roma a tutto l'anno 1914. Note storiche (Rome: Tipografia Editrice "Italia", 1921), 53.↩
