To the hardcore xiphomachophiliac, there’s only one thing better than finding a great old sword.

Finding a great old sword that once belonged to a great old man.

Looks like an enterprising diver and treasure hunter has entered sword nirvana. He claims to have found a sword in an ancient shipwreck.

A sword that can be traced back directly to Admiral Nelson…

We freely admit that time and over-use of our ganglia has long eradicated our ability to tell where the adventures of Horatio Hornblower end, and where the biography of Horatio Nelson begins. We also admit that we don’t give a “harrumph-harrumph” about our shortcoming.

Here’s the story:

“British diver Mark Ellyatt was part of a team that discovered the shipwreck of the HMS Victoria warship, which sank in 1893 off the coast of Lebanon, in 2004, The Daily Telegraph reported Sunday.

“Now, Ellyatt said he has located the ship’s admiral’s cabin, which contained a number of items he believes belonged to Nelson, Britain’s most celebrated naval hero.”

Among them… you guessed it!

Read more right here!

Since we just reviewed and edited this posting and still have one more article on Italian-style sports saber in the pipeline, we’ve decided to make this “Eye-talian Saber Week” at SHotS Fencing Classics…

by J. Christoph Amberger

Dating old photographs is almost as difficult as dating old fencing weapons. Luckily, when we first posted this back in 2008, we still could draw on the expertise of Dr. Bill Gaugler to help us out. (As usual, click on the photo for an inconsiderately large version of the photo!)

The picture supposedly shows Masaniello Parise’s assistants Carlo Pessina and Salvatore Pecoraro (standing, with the dark jacket) who in 1910 collaborated to publish La scherma di sciabola, the new offical textbook for saber instruction at the Military Fencing Masters School in Rome. The identification is difficult, but allowing for certain growth patterns in his mustache, the fencer to the left could be Pessina.

(Here’s a nifty “family tree” of how the protagonists of the Italian schools interrelate.)

A German-bladed Radaelli saber from the Amberger Collection

They’re using Radaelli sabers.

Who are we to disagree with the late master?

But we dare to interject: The fencer to the left has done more than just retreating: He has removed his front foot behind his back foot. The flank cut of the right-hand fencer might well have been an attack into a flaunted opening on the thigh.

The fencer to the left has removed the target and now counters into the exposed upper sword arm. Fencing aficionados will recognize this as a variant of the old-fashioned “slipping the leg” we know back from the early days of Henry Angelo.

Which would not just be a poke in the eye of those who claim considerations for horse meat to have excluded the leg as being a target in saber fencing. But also those recent McMartialists who claim that the Italian saber constituted a complete  break with the cut fencing traditions of earlier generations.

Christopher Holzmann adds: “The same action is shown in Parise’s 1884 work and is performed in conjunction with a stop cut to the arm. Del Frate does a half cross step back with a parry of low 3 or 4 against rising cuts to the flank. The fact is that steeply rising flank or abdomen cuts are quite likely to hit the leg, intentionally or not, so it is still good practice if you don’t want to get hit at all.”

Product Placement: Once Complicated. Now Easy. Your Shortcut into the Art of the Italian duelling sabre! (ENLIGHTENMENT IS ONE CLICK! AWAY!)

The armed and police forces of the world had their choices made for them by virtue of the very number of recruits needing instruction.

But how did they get them to look good from a distance…

There are two basic approaches to teaching the handling of the sword: The individual approach of turning a student into a competent athlete or artist via one-on-one progressive instruction.

And the approach of turning a mass of raw recruits into functional literates of the sword via group drill in preset basic patterns .

Totalitarianism (and American cheerleading choreographers) instinctively grasped the beauty and appeal that could be distilled from a mass of people doing the same moves in an orchestrated fashion. From Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens to the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, moving pictures have liked the aesthetic reduction of the individual into a smoothly functioning cog in a machine.

Looking good for Il Duce: "The Metropolitan Police force puts on a stirring exhibition to celebrate the founding of the famous organization. Rome, Italy."—c. 1936

One of the rare and early samples of fencing’s mass choreography in the Amberger Collection is a snippet of film cut from a 1935-37 newsreel, featuring a saber exhibition by the Rome Metropolitan Police. The slug accompanying the 35mm negative strip reads:

“The Metropolitan Police force puts on a stirring exhibition to celebrate the founding of the famous organization. Rome, Italy.”

(Maybe our Italian readers—you know who you are!—could help us dating this even more closely! Grazie!)

As a magnifying click on the above picture will show, the weapon used in this athletic exhibition is modern-style straight-bladed sports saber, not the famous sciabola di terreno.

The secret to the eye-pleasing mastery of spatial relation is revealed in a close-up: A complex grid of chalk lines on the muddy ground keeps the individual fencer from straying and spoiling the clean line—another triumph of the will of the fencing master, the artistic director, and groundskeeper Luigi and his chalk applicator.