i1CR – Ing. Vincenzo Quasimodo, Gorizia: A.D.R.I. Member and A.R.R.L. "Official Foreign Contact Station"

Il Radio Giornale (December 1927, page 21) reproduces the A.R.R.L. Certificate of Merit awarded to ei1CR after the International Relay Contest of May 1927, in which the station scored 88 points.

Introduction

This small A.D.R.I. card from Gorizia is a reception report sent to the American station u1ACI and forwarded by the A.R.R.L. QSL bureau in Hartford. Its sender, Ing. Vincenzo Quasimodo (1899–1949), is a figure who turns up in two quite different histories: that of Italian amateur radio, where ei1CR was the best-placed Italian in the A.R.R.L. relay contest of 1927, and that of Italian literature, as the elder brother of the poet Salvatore Quasimodo (Nobel Prize 1959) and brother-in-law of the writer Elio Vittorini.

The Quasimodo family in Gorizia

The Quasimodos were Sicilians. The father, Gaetano Quasimodo (1867–1960), was a railway station master who retired in 1927; Vincenzo, born in 1899, was the first-born, followed by Salvatore (1901), Ettore (1903) and Rosa (1905). Local Gorizia sources describe the family's years in the city in the second half of the 1920s. According to an article by Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso (2008), drawing on Vittorini's Gorizia period, the retired "cavalier Gaetano Quasimodo" opened a radiotelephony shop at corso Vittorio Emanuele 6, holding a ministerial licence to build receivers, while "another son, Vincenzo, opened the first radio station in the city at corso Verdi 32", in the entrance corridor of the Savoia-Centrale cinema, and ran a popular radio advice column in Squille Isontine, the local paper edited by Sofronio Pocarini. The press for the 2026–27 exhibition La libertà irrequieta (Il Piccolo, Il Goriziano, La Nouvelle Vague) calls Vincenzo "a radio-technology enthusiast and one of the pioneers of radio in Gorizia" and a contributor to Squille isontine, and credits him with the magazine's publication in May 1926 of Salvatore's early poem "La càtarsi", the first known trace of the poet's link with Gorizia. In 1927 Rosa Quasimodo married Elio Vittorini after their celebrated elopement; the couple lived with her parents in Piazzutta 16, where their son Giusto was born in 1928.

In December 1927 Il Radio Giornale printed the list of the A.R.I. provincial delegates, with "Prov. di Gorizia – Ing. Vincenzo Quasimodo (via Alvarez n. 20)": by then he was the association's representative for the province.

A.D.R.I.

The card is printed with the initials A.D.R.I. on both sides of the heading. The Associazione Dilettanti Radiotecnici Italiani was the Milan-based amateur association presided over by Eugenio Gnesutta (1GN), formally constituted on 1 December 1924 (its seat at via Borgonuovo 21), which the Ministry had empowered to issue listening authorisations for wavelengths below 300 metres and which published through La Radio per Tutti. On 1 January 1927 the A.D.R.I. and the Radio Club Nazionale Italiano merged to form the Associazione Radiotecnica Italiana (A.R.I.), with Ernesto Montù as first president. An A.D.R.I. card therefore belongs to the 1925–1926 print run of its member, even if, as with many amateurs, the stock was used up afterwards.

1CR on the air, 1926–1927

Gorizia had been Austrian until 1918 and was one of the "new provinces"; 1CR seems to have been its first licensed amateur transmitter. The station enters the pages of Il Radio Giornale in 1926, in the lists of Italian transmitters heard abroad:

• June 1926: 1CR heard in the United States and in India.
• September 1926: heard in Great Britain, alongside 1AS, 1ER, 1MT and the other active Italians.
• October 1926: heard in Austria by oAA and oHL, and again in Great Britain.
• December 1926: heard in Spain.
• December 1927: heard in Spain by ea261 of Barcelona between 22 September and 21 October 1927.

The station's best-documented achievement is the A.R.R.L. International Relay Contest of May 1927. QST of October 1927, publishing the results, states that "in Italy (ei), 1CR made a high score of 88 points", the top Italian score. The certificate reproduced above, dated 29 August 1927, appoints the station "an Official Foreign Contact Station" of the American Radio Relay League and declares it "the most reliable point in Italy for contact with the United States and Canada". Il Radio Giornale of December 1927 (page 21) announced the award: "the amateur station ei1CR (Ing. Vincenzo Quasimodo, Gorizia) has received in these days from the A.R.R.L. a diploma of merit containing the appointment as Official Foreign Contact Station for traffic between Italy, the United States and Canada, following the results of the international relay contest held by the A.R.R.L. last May, in which ei1CR scored 88 points."

The A.R.I. contest of 1927 and the 1928 season

The A.R.I. also ranked the station highly. The commission appointed by the council on 17 April 1928 (Gnesutta, Montù, Pugliese) met on 8 June to examine the QSLs and reports of the Concorso A.R.I. 1927, the national emission contest whose rules had been published in December 1926. Only four competitors completed the whole programme. In the final table printed in Il Radio Giornale of June 1928 (page 29) 1CR is third overall, behind Franco Marietti's 1NO, Italian champion for 1927, and 1MA, and ahead of 1UU. In the partial classifications 1CR was second in telegraphic communications and third in telephony, in the written report and in efficiency.

The monthly telegraphy table shows 1CR scoring every month from February to August 1927 (with 7 points in April, May and June) and again in October and November, and placing second in the month-by-month classification; the telephony table credits it with points in May and June 1927.

The same issue lists 1CR among the entrants of both the radiotelegraphic and the radiotelephonic A.R.I. contests for 1928, and prints a Wellington, New Zealand, reception list from oz2GO (Harold G. Fownes) that includes ei1CR. The station was therefore still active in the spring of 1928.

The card itself

• To: "Radio u1ACI, Gordon Debter, Attleboro, Mass., U.S.A." The US amateur call books of June 1926, June 1927 and 1928 list 1ACI as Allan W. Gordon, 29 Dexter St., Attleboro, Mass.; the handwritten "Gordon Debter" is evidently Quasimodo's rendering of "Gordon, Dexter [St.]". The card went through the A.R.R.L. bureau ("Forwarded by A.R.R.L., Hartford, Conn., U.S.A.").
• Report: "We received yours on 30/8 at 2.30 (T.E.C.)", i.e. Central European time; "we answered you on QRH 36 m". QRK R6-7, QRM many, QRN some, QSB rare.
• Receiver: Bourne + 2 BF (two audio stages); aerial 1 wire, 35 m.
• Transmitter: Hartley, direct; 35 watts input, AC.
• Remarks: "Tks qso OM, hope cuagn. PSE QSL by crd. TKS. Best 73's OM!", signed by Quasimodo.
• Back: printed "Coordinate geografiche della stazione i1CR – Gorizia (Italia): lat. N 45°56' – long. E Green. 13°10'". The latitude is Gorizia's; the longitude printed is about half a degree west of the town's actual 13°37' E.

On the date

No year is written on the card. The catalogue year 1928 is an inference and should be read as an upper bound. The card uses the pre-Washington intermediates "i" (Italy, in use from 1924) and "u" (USA, from the IARU scheme of 1925), while by December 1927 Il Radio Giornale was already writing "ei1CR" and "nu" for American stations, and from 1 January 1929 Italian calls carried the definitive "I". The A.D.R.I. imprint dates the print run to 1925–1926. The station is documented as active from mid-1926 to at least the spring of 1928, so the QSO on 30 August at 02:30 CET, answered on 36 metres, falls in the summer of 1926, 1927 or 1928; the old-style prefixes and the A.D.R.I. stock make 1926 or 1927 the more likely, with 1928 as the latest possible year.

Key Specifications of i1CR

Sources

• Il Radio Giornale, June, September, October and December 1926 (lists of Italian transmitters heard abroad); December 1927, p. 21 ("Le vie dello spazio": ei1CR award and certificate facsimile) and p. 30 (A.R.I. provincial delegates); scans at introni.it.
• Il Radio Giornale, May 1928 (A.R.I. provincial delegates) and June 1928, pp. 27–29 (oz2GO reception list; 1928 contest entrants; "Classifica del concorso A.R.I. 1927"); scans at introni.it.
• QST, October 1927, results of the International Relay Contest, May 1927 (worldradiohistory.com).
• Amateur Radio Stations of the United States, U.S. Department of Commerce, editions of June 1926, June 1927 and June 1928, and Radio Amateur Call Book, September 1928: entry 1ACI / W1ACI, Allan W. Gordon, 29 Dexter St., Attleboro, Mass. (archive.org).
• Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa, "La mia guerra" (1 January 2008), on Vittorini's years in Gorizia and the Quasimodo family's radio shop and station.
• Il Piccolo, "Vittorini, Quasimodo e la libertà irrequieta tra Gorizia e Siracusa" (1 September 2026); Il Goriziano, "Da Siracusa a Gorizia, la 'libertà irrequieta' di Vittorini e Rosa Quasimodo diventa una mostra" (25 August 2026); La Nouvelle Vague, "Da Gorizia a Siracusa, Elio Vittorini e Rosa Quasimodo in mostra" (2026).
• Italian Wikipedia, "Salvatore Quasimodo" (family: Gaetano Quasimodo, Vincenzo 1899–1949, Ettore, Rosa).
• Federico Paoletti, Storia della radiodiffusione in Italia (federicopaoletti.it), entries for 1 December 1924 (constitution of the A.D.R.I.), 15 January 1924 and 18 April 1925 (prefixes), 1 January 1927 (merger into A.R.I.) and 1 January 1929; Wikipedia, "Associazione Radioamatori Italiani".
• The card itself (front and back), K1FM collection.