Trattato di scherma teorico-pratico illustrato by Vittorio Lambertini

It is with great pleasure that I can share with you today the 1870 treatise by Vittorio Lambertini, its full title being Trattato di scherma teorico-pratico illustrato della moderna scuola italiana di spada e sciabola ('Theoretical-practical fencing treatise on the modern Italian school of sword and sabre'). This particular book comes from my own collection, so I have been able to take high quality photos of every page; the resulting PDF is thus quite large. I have also provided a transcription to make it easier to search through the text for study purposes.

Scans  |  Transcription

The 150-year-old book shows many signs of its age, largely due to it being a paperback, but its 29 fold-out plates are mostly in good condition. I personally find the illustrator's art style to be rather elegant despite is simplicity.

My particular copy appears to have been purchased by the highly decorated war veteran Leopoldo Serra in 1875, as indicated by the signature near the front of the book and by what seems to be part of a receipt for a magazine or newspaper subscription that was found between pages 60 and 61, probably being used as a bookmark.

Nothing is yet known about Lambertini's life or career, and his treatise was, unfortunately, largely overlooked in its time. Nevertheless, Lambertini's treatise is significant for the modern reader as it provides a very detailed look into the sword method of Luigi Zangheri, a fencing master who was highly regarded in the 19th century but never wrote a treatise himself. Clemente Lambertini was a student of Zangheri, and passed the method on to his son, Vittorio.¹

Luigi Zangheri was a fencing master from Cesena who opened a fencing hall in Bologna around the year 1825, where he taught sword, sabre, counterpoint, and bastone. He soon developed an outstanding reputation as a fencer, a teacher, and as a man who was reviving the art of fencing in northern Italy.² His method was not revolutionary in the same sense as Radaelli's, but rather he was largely seen to be preserving the traditional Neapolitan method whilst also making his own modifications, such as using a slightly lighter and shorter Italian foil, abandoning the practice of binding the sword to the hand, and allowing the use of certain 'French' techniques such as the coupé. Zangheri produced several celebrated fencing masters, such as Giuseppe Borelli, Gaetano Simonetti, and Cesare Enrichetti.³

Enrichetti was already quite famous by the time Lambertini published his treatise, having been appointed as the head of the Scuola Magistrale in Parma in 1868 and himself producing a host of talented fencers such as Ferdinando Masiello, Giovanni Pagliuca, Gaetano Baracco, and Giovanni Ciullini.⁴ Enrichetti published his own treatise a year after Lambertini did, and so by being able to compare the two, we can achieve an excellent understanding of Zangheri's method.

Aside from containing more detailed information on the teaching progression and pedagogy of his method than Enrichetti's treatise, Lambertini's book also contains a treatise on the sabre. The exact origins of this sabre method are not stated, but it nevertheless provides an added insight into the sabre fencing methods of northern Italy prior to the rise of the Radaellians. It is also possible that it resembles the kind of sabre fencing that was being taught at Enrichetti's school before it was merged with Radaelli's in 1874.

A full, detailed analysis of Lambertini's method and its differences compared to Enrichetti's is a topic for another day, but one example of this is something which Lambertini himself points out, which is that he only includes five parries in his method, those being 4th, 3rd, half-circle, 2nd, and 1st, compared to Enrichetti who also includes the 'intermediary' parries of low 3rd and low 4th. Lambertini states that it was his father who reduced the number of parries to five.⁵

1 Vittorio Lambertini, Trattato di scherma teorico-pratico illustrato (Bologna, 1870), iii.^↩
2 "Accademia di scherma," Teatri, arti e letteratura, 14 May 1835, 86.^↩
3 Carlo Pilla, Arte e scuole di scherma (Bologna: Società tipografica già compositori, 1886), 34–5.^↩
4 ibid., 36.^↩
5 Lambertini, Trattato di scherma, 39.^↩

The republication of Marchionni's 1847 treatise

Alberto Marchionni's Trattato di scherma was the first work to be published explicitly discussing the 'mixed' school of fencing, and was highly regarded by many of those in the north of Italy who were themselves also considered proponents of the mixed school. Although it is of great significance within the context of Radaelli and his contemporaries, I will not be discussing the technical matter contained in the treatise here today. Instead, I wish to provide a clarification for the publication of this important work which may not be immediately obvious upon first reading it.

The title page of this book gives a publication date of 1847, however, I wish to point out a few parts of the book which indicate that the majority of copies which can now be found online (and presumably those found in libraries) were published almost 20 years later.

Our first clue of this is contained at the end of part 1, where one finds the following note to the reader from the publisher:

In 1847 the author undertook the printing of this treatise, but due to the political events that took place in 1848, he had to suspend its publication in order to take part in the war of independence as a volunteer, and then due to various circumstances having to continue his military career, where he still finds himself with the rank of major on leave of absence.
Encouraged by several of his old associates, and urged on again by various masters of this art who would like to see this treatise completed, he took to continuing it.
Hence we are more than certain that this book will receive universal approval, due to the useful considerations demonstrated by the author, and due to it truly being a complete treatise on this most noble art.¹

Thus we already see that this edition must have been published some time after the First Italian War of Independence. At the end of the book, Marchionni includes various acknowledgements to his friends and colleagues for their support in continuing the publication of his treatise. Among others, he lists Enrichetti at the Royal Military College in Florence as having bought one copy of the book, Maestro Pini in Livorno as buying 4, a Maestro Radaelli in Milan buying 5, and Maestro Lambertini buying 2.²

Further on he gives praise to Carlo Tambornini and Cesare Alberto Blengini for their treatises, calling the former the best sabre treatise written to-date, and commending the latter for his methodology for group fencing instruction.³ Given that Blengini's treatise was published in 1864, the republication of Marchionni's treatise cannot have occurred earlier than this.

By searching outside Marchionni's text, we find an issue of a short-lived newspaper from 8 August 1864 by the name of l'Esercito Illustrato. In this issue, we find an article by an unnamed writer giving a review of Marchionni's treatise, which he says was in fact republished twice in that year:

The first instalment of this important work was published in 1847, the second and the third date from 1864.⁴

So with a republication date of 1864 (or better yet, two republication dates), we can fairly safely assume that the masters cited by Marchionni would have been Giuseppe Pini (father of the famous Eugenio Pini), Bonaventura Radaelli (older brother of Giuseppe Radaelli, who at this time was following Avogadro and the Monferrato cavalry in their various postings in Italy⁵), and Clemente Lambertini (father of Vittorio Lambertini).


1 Alberto Marchionni, Trattato di scherma sopra un nuovo sistema di giuoco misto di scuola italiana e francese, [2nd ed.] (Florence: Federigo Bendici, 1847 [1864]), 206.^↩
2 ibid., 373.^↩
3 ibid., 373–4.^↩
4 Bibliografia, L'esercito illustrato: giornale militare, 6 August 1864, 445.^↩
5 Jacopo Gelli, Bibliografia generale della scherma con note critiche, biografiche, e storiche (Florence: Tipografia Editrice di Luigi Niccolai, 1890), 167.^↩