Radaellians Respond to Pecoraro and Pessina (Part 4)

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 Vannucchi

Fencing 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

*******

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.^↩

Radaellians Respond to Pecoraro and Pessina (Part 3)

In very early 1911, or possibly December 1910, the long critique of Pecoraro and Pessina's sabre treatise which Ferdinando Masiello had promised back in August was finally published. The length of its title, La Scherma di Sciabola: Osservazioni sul Trattato dei Maestri Pecoraro e Pessina Vice-Direttori della Scuola Magistrale militare di Scherma, portends the length of the booklet itself, totalling 161 pages (well over half the length of the treatise in question).

Click here for the full scans

The introductory sections suggest that Masiello had intended his booklet to reach a slightly wider audience of readers who, understandably, may not already be aware of the debate that had raged in the public press over the course of the previous year, but still wish to remain up-to-date with the latest developments in Italian fencing. Masiello begins by addressing Pecoraro and Pessina directly, saying that although they were all were raised under the same 'father Redaelli', from the day that the Master's School came under a hybrid and defective method, they had been divided. He asserts that he had always fought 'at the breach' for his conscience, and expects that Pecoraro and Pessina will give his opinions due respect and refute them with well-reasoned arguments if they disagree. Masiello comes very close to apologising in advance for the tone of his writing, as he openly admits that the more light-hearted remarks and jokes were to keep any less enthusiastic readers sufficiently engaged and entertained.

Turning then to the reader, Masiello provides a summary of what he considers the most important events that led up to the present debate. He states that Pecoraro and Pessina's initial announcement of their treatise in the first half of 1910 contained an element of truth when they implied that sabre fencing had by then fallen into decline. Where Masiello takes issue with this statement, however, is that the treatise authors themselves should accept much of the blame for that state of affairs. Evidence of this is in all that took place in Italian fencing following the death of Giuseppe Radaelli and the appointment of Masaniello Parise at the Master's School in 1884. This, Masiello believes, is the origin of the steady decline in Italian fencing throughout the past 25 years, as the sabre method Parise then introduced was so regressive and flawed that Giovanni Monti, who had served as Radaelli's replacement at the school's final years in Milan, supposedly 'cried like a child' after seeing a demonstration of the new method he would be forced to teach.

Pecoraro and Pessina had been complicit in teaching this defective sabre method at the Master's School for two and a half decades. Meanwhile, Masiello famously published his own treatise in 1887, which was well received throughout Italy, but Pecoraro and Pessina had consistently refused to engage with Masiello's theories, even when he gave a public demonstration of them in Rome in 1890. Despite the fact that Masiello's method was then adopted by the British army, Pecoraro publicly doubled-down in his support for Parise's method in a letter sent to the magazine Scherma Italiana in 1894, which Masiello reproduces in its entirely in the booklet's introduction.

Masiello asks the new leaders of the Master's School how they can square such a declaration of commitment, and their long career teaching Parise's system, with their own treatise, which is clearly based on Radaellian theory? The timing of this sudden conversion is also conspicuous to Masiello, given how soon after Parise's death the treatise was announced. Masiello imagines that if an afterlife existed and Radaelli and Parise were looking down on the two authors from heaven, both masters would feel betrayed and disappointed in their students. Finishing on this sombre image, Masiello then provides reproductions of the most significant newspaper articles in the debate published over the previous year by himself and Pecoraro and Pessina, all of which have been either translated or summarised in the course of this current series of articles.

The remaining 134 pages consist of Masiello's observations on the treatise itself. The critique is divided into three parts, corresponding to the three parts of Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise, with Masiello providing commentary on almost every individual section or topic found within it. If you have read my summary in Part 1 of the critique Masiello already published in La Nazione on 19 August 1910, then you will be familiar with the main arguments presented throughout this booklet. In this expanded format Masiello's semantic arguments become even more glaringly prominent, but more substantive arguments can be found regarding the preliminary exercises, the molinelli, the lunge (a whopping 12 pages' worth), the cuts, and the inquartata.

Much of the criticism presented against these techniques in particular come from the point of view that since Masiello's own treatise presented long (sometimes overly long) mechanical explanations for why his chosen method of execution is preferable, Pecoraro and Pessina should also have to provide lengthy explanations for their own choices in order for their treatise to be considered an improvement over pre-existing theory, thus justifying its publication. The 2nd and 3rd editions of Masiello's sabre treatise goes to great lengths to explain why his fully-inclined lunge is superior to one with an upright torso, and yet in Masiello's eyes Pecoraro and Pessina have disregard all of this reasoning and advocate the latter version, providing no justification for it.

When it comes to Pecoraro and Pessina's cuts, Masiello is frequently annoyed and confused at the authors' repeated use of the term 'strettissimo' to describe how the molinello movement is refined to create a smaller, faster arc which is used to give practical cuts. Masiello asserts that since the length of the wielder's sabre and forearm never change, the arc of the molinello cannot be reduced. Those familiar with Masiello's work should find such a criticism particularly confusing, as Masiello himself uses the word 'ristrettissimo' several times when describing how to apply cuts by molinello in his own treatise.¹

Another point Masiello makes in this section and which reoccurs elsewhere throughout his critique is that the method of gripping the sabre as described by the authors does not permit many of the positions shown in the photographs. In Masiello's reading, the grip is described as static and unchangeable, unlike how Masiello allows the thumb to slide up and down the grip to put the blade more or less in line with the wielder's arm. This line of argumentation is somewhat reminiscent of Achille Angelini's reading of Del Frate's treatise back in the 1870s, in which Angelini disregards the illustrations and asserts that Radaelli wished the sabre to be always held fully perpendicular to the forearm.

If throughout his critique Masiello is constantly exasperated at how Pecoraro and Pessina have ignored the practical improvements of their predecessors, elsewhere he is suspicious that the authors have knowingly indulged in plagiarism. When Pecoraro and Pessina describe how to gain distance in an attack by bringing the rear foot up against the front foot before lunging, Masiello sees so much similarity with his own work that he places the two relevant sections side-by-side for the reader to compare. Elsewhere Masiello claims the authors plagiarised his terminology and phrasing in their descriptions of the cuts, and recalls that at a tournament in 1906 he gave a demonstration of what Pecoraro and Pessina call the tocchi di sciabola di passaggio to some fencing masters, Pecoraro among them, and that this must have been where the authors first found out about the technique, despite Masiello receiving no credit. Furthermore, their preliminary exercises were clearly stolen from the treatise of Nicolò Bruno, whose versions are superior anyway.² Despite these tenuous, or even spurious, claims, the most credible accusation is in relation to the authors' section entitled 'preparatory lesson for the bout', where Masiello rightly points out the close similarities between the first three paragraphs of their work and the 1876 treatise by Settimo Del Frate.³

Skipping to Masiello's conclusion, he lists 17 items which he considers notably absent in the treatise. Directly translated, these are:

1. Definition of fencing in general;
2. Benefits of fencing;
3. Harms of a false system;
4. Force in fencing;
5. Method of wielding the sabre;
6. The sabre considered as a lever;
7. Laws which govern the guard;
8. Laws which govern the lunge;
9. The (very important) division of the target, without which an inexperienced fencer could confuse one target with another, as happened to the authors themselves (see p. 18 of their treatise);
10. How to perform the passage from one parry to another;
11. Lunge by launching the left foot back;
12. Absence of scientific proofs to contrast certain principles of theirs with those of other authors;
13. Absence of scientific proofs to absolutely and definitively establish the pivot from which one generates the very important action (both for the sword and for the sabre) of the disengagement, which the authors prescribe sometimes to the radiocarpal joint, sometimes to the scapulohumeral joint;
14. Absence of indications regarding how the cuts should be given, i.e. whether as hammer blows or by slicing;
15. Absence of a psychological proof on the advantage the attacker has over the defender;
16. Lacking the copertini;
17. Lacking a chapter to explain some expressions used in fencing language.

If any of these seem overly specific, that is because they are all topics which Masiello himself deals with in his own treatises; clearly, he considered his own work to be far superior. He ends by noting that he had received credible reports that a commission of senior officers, appointed by the Ministry of War, had recently given a favourable verdict of Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise, and that it would likely be approved to replace Parise's sabre curriculum at the Master's School. It is this factor which Masiello asserts was the main motivating factor in writing such a detailed rebuttal of Pecoraro and Pessina's work, since whatever they write will effectively become gospel for the next generation of Italian fencers, thus they owe it to everyone to make their textbook as perfect as possible. He repeats that he considers both authors to be good friends, and hopes that his critique will be read in this light.

Following the booklet's publication, I have been unable to find any published response from Pecoraro and Pessina, but in all likelihood they did read it. Whether or not they gave due consideration Masiello's critique is certainly up for debate, but if we compare some of his remarks to the revised edition of Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise, published in 1912, we can indeed find several specific instances which strongly suggest awareness and consideration of Masiello's observations. Some are changes to particular wordings which Masiello considered confusing or misleading, such as their use of the phrase 'a piena mano' when describing the grip of the sabre. In the 1912 edition this phrase was removed and another paragraph and a half is added describing how the sabre is to be wielded in the various movements, using which parts of the upper limb.

When describing the fourth preliminary exercise in the 1910 edition, the authors make a reference to the 'cappuccio', or backstrap, of the grip. As Masiello points out, this term had not been defined anywhere in the treatise, and so it is removed in the 1912 edition, also making other improvements to the descriptions of these exercises. As for the molinelli, Pecoraro and Pessina do not do away entirely with the 'strettissimo' descriptor so despised by Masiello, but they do at least provide a better explanation of how the molinello motion can be made smaller, through a 'simple turn of the hand accompanied by a slight bending and subsequent sudden extension of the elbow.'⁴

With many of the more substantial changes found in the 1912 edition, such as the comprehensively rewritten preface, it is harder to attribute Masiello's influence with any certainty; nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to adduce that, despite all the semantic and sarcastic nit-picking, Pecoraro and Pessina's work was improved from the public hazing it received from Masiello.

Given all the negative impressions of Pecoraro and Pessina's treatise we have looked at so far, we ought not assume that this was the universal impression amongst all Italian fencers. It is impossible to determine how well the method was received by most in the community, but as Masiello himself notes, the system was deemed good enough to receive at least provisional approval from the Ministry of War by early 1911. Furthermore, we can find at least one supportive voice from this time who spoke up in defence of the authors and to push back against Masiello's self-righteousness.

Colonel Alberto Cavaciocchi, the commanding officer of the 60th infantry regiment, had been an avid fencer for many decades, originally learning the old Radaellian method as part of his military training before being fortunate enough to train under Masaniello Parise himself. From this point on Cavaciocchi became convinced of the superiority of Parise's method, finding the improvements brought to the Radaellian method by Masiello and his colleagues to be insufficient. This conviction was carried over to Parise's successors, Pecoraro and Pessina, when they published their own treatise which built upon not only Radaelli's foundation, but Parise's too. Feeling that Masiello's critical articles in La Nazione could not remain unanswered, Cavaciocchi took it upon himself to respond if only in his capacity as an amateur, which he did in the form of a substantial 8000-word article published in the March issue of the Rivista Militare Italiana.⁵

While asserting that the Neapolitan foil method had always been superior to others, Cavaciocchi does recognise the merit and achievements of Radaelli's method, particularly in its later, more refined forms. His primary critique of Radaelli's system, however, is its body carriage, specifically in the guard and the lunge. He finds the slightly rear-weight guard position and upright lunge advocated by Parise to be much more logical and effective than those prescribed by Radaelli. This naturally gives Cavaciocchi a rather favourable opinion of the new system detailed by Pecoraro and Pessina, as a clear goal of their treatise was to combine the best aspects of Radaelli and Parise's theory. Masiello, on the other hand, instead managed to amplify many of the original Radaellian flaws, with his untypically wide stance in the guard and accentuated lean in the lunge.

Instead of explicitly defending Pecoraro and Pessina's system, well over half of Cavaciocchi's article is dedicated to comparing Masiello and Parise's systems, partially to redeem the latter, but also to show the continuity of the sound theoretical foundations inherited by Pecoraro and Pessina in their own work. Cavaciocchi reveals that he himself was one of the members of the commission eluded to by Masiello which had the task of assessing and approving the new treatise for use in the army, so it stands to reason why he would feel the necessity to now defend both the authors as well as his own reputation. He ends with the hope that the teaching of fencing at the Master's School continues 'holding firm to the excellent fundamental bases established by Masaniello Parise, but without renouncing that constant and progressive perfection which human nature unceasingly aims for.'

In the final part of this series, we will hear two more Radaellian judgements on the new direction being taken by Italian sabre fencing: one decidedly negative and the other refreshingly positive and hopeful.

*******

1 Examples can be found on pages 78, 79, 90, 118, 120 of Ferdinando Masiello, La scherma di sciabola (Florence: R. Bemporad, 1902).^↩
2 Cf. Nicolò Bruno, Risorgimento della vera scherma di sciabola italiana basata sull'oscillazione del pendolo (Novaraç Tipografia Novarese, 1891), 63–8.^↩
3 Cf. Settimo Del Frate, Istruzione per la scherma di sciabola e di spada del Prof. Giuseppe Radaelli scritta d'ordine del ministero della guerra (Milan: Gaetano Baroffio, 1876), 26.^↩
4 Salvatore Pecoraro and Carlo Pessina, La Scherma di Sciabola: Trattato Teorico-Pratico (Viterbo: G. Agnesotti, 1912), 53.^↩
5 Alberto Cavaciocchi, "Sui metodi di scherma per l'esercito," Rivista Militare Italiana 56, no. 3 (16 March 1911): 611–34.^↩