📚 THE COL MAÒR TELLS
It is the main source of MEMORIA: sixty years of news, memories, photographs and debates. But the Col Maòr also has a story of its own, made of a motto, a duplicating machine, a masthead handed over to the Section and then brought back home.
April 1964: a newsletter “without pretensions”
A green and white cover, with its row of headings: National Alpini Association, Belluno Section, “Gen. Pietro Zaglio” Group, Salce. Below them, the name: “COL MAÒR 1964”. The issue is dated “April 1964 – Salce”; the exact day, 1 April, the newsletter itself would recall forty years later. Inside, a few lines are enough to tell you what you are holding. The Group’s Board has decided “to give life to this newsletter”, which, however, “has no pretension of being a periodical or a newspaper”. Responsible “for shortcomings or omissions” is Mario Dell’Eva; contributors, “all the members”. And there is a motto, one the Col Maòr would never let go of: “Esce quando può; non è un numero unico, ma ogni numero è unico” — it comes out when it can; it is not a one-off issue, but every issue is unique.
Why “Col Maòr”
It is Dell’Eva himself, signing “Dem.”, who explains the name. The Col Maòr is the “hill south of Giamosa”, the one people skied down in winter, and the name “should derive from the Latin ‘Collis Maior'”. Why that name? “Just like that, by chance”: the newsletter, he writes, “was born like this, the village way, in pure simplicity”. Nine years later the Group would climb that same hill to celebrate its first ten years (the story of the celebration).
The duplicator years
Dell’Eva wrote the early issues and ran them off on the duplicator himself. In 1967 the newsletter would describe its own “modest duplicated dress”, “barracks-office style”. And yet the second issue, in June 1964, had already found room for a long portrait of the general after whom the Group is named (his story). In December 1967, in its fourth year of regular publication, came the “new dress”: a masthead designed by member Augusto Burlon, always the same, meant among other things to save a sheet of paper. By now the newsletter was travelling to Group leaders, Section board members and Alpini publications.
1987: the Col Maòr becomes the Section’s newsletter
As late as October 1986 the masthead read “Newsletter of the A.N.A. ‘Gen. Pietro Zaglio’ Group of Salce”. In February 1987 it changed: “Newsletter of the Belluno Section and the A.N.A. Group of Salce”. The paper told its readers that the year’s six issues would be printed and would reach every Group in the province: “It will therefore be the newsletter of the ‘Belluno Section and Salce Group'”. From April 1987 it was a “bimonthly periodical”, registered with the Court of Belluno (no. 3/87 of 6 March 1987). Arturo Vita, editor of “L’Alpino”, greeted it with the words: “now it is a Section masthead”.
Dell’Eva, who would also become vice-president and then president of the Section, kept it in his hands until 2002: 234 issues in all, one every two months.
2003: the “death” and the revival
In 2002 the Col Maòr passed to the Section, which, however, chose another masthead for its newsletter: “In marcia”. The Col Maòr seemed bound to disappear. In December 2003 the Salce Group answered with a single issue printed in-house: responsible, Group leader Ezio Caldart; on the editorial team, Mario Brancaleone, Cesare Colbertaldo, Michele Sacchet and Paolo Tormen. Caldart did not mince his words: the paper was carrying on “after a few right-thinking heads in the Section had decided its death”. He also recalled how far it had travelled in forty years: “also to Europe, Africa, America and Australia”, all the way to the emigrants. In the same issue the Group said goodbye to Mario Dell’Eva, the man who had created the newsletter.
From April 2004 the Col Maòr was once again the Group’s periodical, registered with the Court of Belluno (no. 1/2004 of 28 January 2004), with Ezio Caldart as president and Roberto De Nart as editor-in-chief. That first issue of the new series marked the “40th anniversary of the foundation of the Group and of the Col Maòr”.
The Col Maòr today
Since then the newsletter has come out regularly, first every four months and then every three, put together by a team of members under editor Roberto De Nart. In the 2020 edition of the Alpini Press Award it won second prize, tied with “Ocio ala pena” of the Brescia Section: the announcement came in July 2020, the award itself at the 24th Alpini Press Convention in Limone del Garda, in April 2022. Its volumes, from 1964 to the present, can be browsed on the Col Maòr page, and it is on that archive that MEMORIA was built. Sixty years after that green and white cover, the motto has not changed: it comes out when it can, and every issue is unique.
When the sources do not agree
- The award. In 2020 the Group entered the newsletter for the “Vittorio Piotti Alpini Press Award”; later reports speak of the “Alpini Press Award”, 2020 edition. That it is the same award is very likely, but it needs confirming.
- The new masthead. The 60th Anniversary Book places a “new masthead” in 1989; the papers document the change of masthead in 1987.
- “In marcia”. A reader’s letter of 2004 confirms the new Section masthead; the first issue of “In marcia” and its date are not yet in our archive.
Help us remember
- Who keeps issues of the Col Maòr missing from our archive, in particular those of 1986?
- Who has a copy of the booklet “Camminare insieme”, a supplement to the June 1989 Col Maòr?
Write to us from the Contact page: every contribution will be checked and, if confirmed, will enter MEMORIA.
