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Learning to Speak Italian: Part 1, by Rod Fleming
Prologue
I’ve been reading a lot of fencing posts on different web sites and one of the items that keep popping up is Italian grips. I even got involved in one for a while, not knowing any better. Anyway, John has been after me for some time to write something on the Italian grip and I’ve been putting him off because every time I start to write something, I always find myself going back and re-analyzing the things I’ve found out. I’m still analyzing, but after having read so many posts on the Italian grip and hearing a lot of noise about it’s value (or lack thereof) I thought that I would try to put something on paper that laid out the case for the Italian. So here it is. Take it for what it’s worth.
This is about the fourth re-write of this article that I’ve tried to put on paper. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve always had to stop and re-think the whole thing and scrap what I had written and had at least three good reasons for trashing it. That sort of thing is hard on a writer but it keeps me honest. Please bear with me for a little bit while I explain.
For the last year or so, I have been trying to understand something that has piqued my interest, both as a fencer and a physicist. I don’t know where it started, unless it was with a nagging little bit of pain in my wrist and forearm. It wouldn’t go away and I was beginning to think that I was getting a repetitive strain injury from fencing. Rather than spend the rest of my life eating ibuprofen by the ounce, I started trying to think of what was causing the pain and what I could do about it.
During a rehearsal that Nikki and I were doing for our rapier demo, I started to notice that even though the rapier I was using was heavier, it didn’t cause me nearly as much pain to throw around that much steel. I began to wonder why this could be. It certainly wasn’t the mass of the weapon because as I mentioned before, the rapier was much more massive than an epee and a great deal more massive than a foil. I finally decided that it might be the grip on the rapier that was allowing some of the muscles in my arm to rest. I took some time to study the grip and see if I could test the hypothesis.
The closest thing that I could find to the rapier grip was an Italian grip. Deciding to play the hunch, I fired off an order to Santelli for the parts to make an Italian epee. I decided to see if the Italian would give me some relief.
Now, I will have more to say about Santelli’s grip later, but for now, let me say that when I started using the grip, I felt none of the discomfort that I had been feeling with my orthopedics. Feeling that I might be on to something, I shot off an order to Triplette for an Italian foil. I got the same results: No discomfort in the wrist and arm.
Now some of you might say that this shouldn’t come as a surprise and I agree. Repetitive strain injuries end when you stop repeating the strain. Imagine that. What piqued my interest was not only did the pain go away, but my game changed a bit as well. The Italian epee felt more “alive” than the orthopedics. The point was quicker and I had even more strength in my motions than I had before. I did have to practice with the weapon because the Italian was a very different animal from what I had been fencing before and livelier point made control more difficult, but after a while, I became very comfortable with it.
When the foil arrived, I was very impressed. I liked Triplette’s version of an Italian much better than Santelli’s. It was far beefier and much easier to assemble a working electric weapon using the parts Triplette had supplied. It was also much more esthetically pleasing. I started playing around with it and I found that it had the same light point as on the epee, only a little more so. The grip allowed me to put more muscle into my actions and I found that going a coquille with an Italian gave me a distinct advantage.
Before we go too much farther, let me explain what an Italian grip looks like so that you have some idea of what I’m talking about. Starting at the extreme rear of the weapon, you have a pommel about the same size and weight that you’d find on a French grip. Next comes the grip itself. In Triplette’s case, this is an attractive black plastic wrapped with gold wire and the grip has gold metal caps on either end. Next comes a part called the quillions which a holdover from the days of the court sword and the rapier. Its two loops of metal attached by a cross bar. Forward of this, there is what is called the false ricasso.
Now, as some of you know, the ricasso is the flat part of the blade that comes before the business edge. It is where your thumb and index finger go when you hold the weapon. In earlier times, swords were made with a ricasso but since the modern blade has only a little square section, it is covered by a piece of tubing (copper) which makes the weapon much easier to hold. Forward of the ricasso is the bell guard and that looks like any other foil.
The grip has a very elegant look, much like weapons of the past. More importantly, all that mass behind the bell guard gives the weapon some interesting qualities. More on that later as well.
The physicist in me became curious about what was different about the Italian as opposed to the more common orthopedic grips. When you take physics, one of the first things you do is learn about forces and how they work in the real world. In fact, all of Newtonian mechanics is about forces, masses and motion. In an effort to understand what was happening, I started doing an analysis of how this grip functioned as it did. The results have been interesting and now that I understand the weapon better, I know why it does what it does.
Now bear with me for a moment because this gets a little complicated. Human beings manipulate the Universe with their hands. If I pick up any tool, how much force I can apply to a given task depends on how well I can grip the tool. If you were to take Governor Schwartzenegger and hand him a hammer, he could pound a nail with some force F. Now if we hold the good Governor down and cut off three fingers (the ladies of the world are resting easier) and hand him the hammer again, he now strikes the nail with less force because he cannot grip the hammer as effectively. The muscles in those bulgy arms are less effective because his grip is less effective. If he tries to hit the nail as hard as he did before, he’s going to send the hammer flying off in some direction. By removing some of his fingers, we have made the arm muscles pretty useless.
A similar although more complex problem exists in fencing. Your grip on the weapon is what enables you to put strength in your motions. It also enables you to control the point with a fine degree of accuracy. Fencers, especially experienced fencers, don’t often use strength because using strength will sacrifice your control, generally speaking. But, there are times, such as in a parry, where strength is important. Also, strength is what you use to overcome the inertia of the weapon once you get it moving.
What all of this means is that there must be a balance between strength and control. This is the yin and yang of the sword. Emphasize strength over control and your motions are wide and you become vulnerable. But, without strength, you cannot hope to control the blade and you are again vulnerable.
One of the things I learned very early in my fencing career was that the Italian school emphasized strength of motion more than the French, which stressed subtlety and control. It was also said that the French school was better than the Italian for this reason. That turns out to be not quite true. The Italian school is different from the French but it is not inferior. Both developed as schools of actual combat. If you look back at the historical roots of fencing, people were fighting duels with swords and since the idea was to walk away from a duel with no more holes in your skin that you walked in with, styles of combat were taken very seriously.
What is true about the French school (and why instructors love it) is that the grip is very unforgiving of sloppy technique. A French grip will absolutely force a student to develop good habits. It requires you to be precise and develop a high degree of control of the blade. It does this by not allowing you to grip the weapon very efficiently. If your opponent binds your blade and you don’t know how to do a yielding parry, the weapon will go flying out of your hand and you are helpless. If you attempt a disengage attack and don’t have control over the blade, you opponent will derobe and eat your lunch.
Now, I can hear some of you snickering out there. You wonder why I’m bothering to say all this because everybody who knows what they’re doing fences with an orthopedic. Orthopedics are superior to either one of these archaic grips. Well, hang on a minute. I want to throw a little heresy out on the table and see how you deal with it.
Part 2
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