The standard-bearer of Salce, the mule driver of the 50th Battery, the man behind the Befana’s cart
In 1998, in the Col Maòr, one of the members sat down to do the sums. Not of money: of outings. In a single year the Group’s pennant had been carried out “no fewer than 39 times” – seventeen celebrations with other Groups, ten ceremonies for the Fallen, seven parades, three members’ funerals, two swearing-in ceremonies. “Among our members there are some who see it once a year,” he wrote, and they have no idea how many Sundays lie behind it. He signed off like this: “This commitment, too, is part of volunteering, just like civil protection, and it is only right to say thank you to the councillors who do it. Well done, full stop.”
The letter was signed Antonio Tamburlin. That pennant, nearly always, was in his hands.
A mountain gunner
Toni was born in 1943 and belonged to its first intake, though he was attached to the class of ’42. He was called up in November 1963, a few weeks after the Vajont disaster, and did his basic training (the CAR) at Boves, in the province of Cuneo. He came out of it a mountain artilleryman, a gun crewman. Then came Bassano, with the 50th Battery of the “Pieve di Cadore” artillery group, and finally Alto Adige: about five months of “border guard” duty between Vandoies, Rio Pusteria and Sciaves.
A photograph from 1964, republished by the Col Maòr fifty years later, shows him standing to attention while holding upright the barrel of a mortar: more than eighty kilos of it. But what had stayed in Toni’s memory, more than the guns, were the mules. During his national service he had been a mule driver, and thirty years on, the clatter of a pack train was enough to take him back: “it came back to my mind how in 1964 we would set out from Bassano and head towards Asiago for the various training grounds”. In winter the mules were shod for the ice by the “excellent Warrant Officer Collasardo”, and on the tarmac, he remembered, “they looked like so many young ladies in stiletto heels”.
January 1965 was an exceptionally snowy month. The 50th had just come back from an exercise in more than two metres of snow when, at four in the morning, it was roused again: the 37th Battery was stranded above Asiago with its mules and mortars and had been without food for over twenty-four hours. Toni and his comrades set off with shovels and dug a “rotta”, a track through the snow, passing it from hand to hand to throw it over the drifts, from morning until four in the afternoon. When they got through, the men of the 37th left their pack saddles and mortars behind and led the mules to safety along the passage just opened. “We, tired but satisfied at having been able to lend a hand,” Toni wrote, “reached Asiago when night had already fallen.”
This account is the last thing Toni entrusted to the Col Maòr: the paper published it in October 2018, shortly after his death, under the title he had chosen, “Soccorso negli altipiani”, and with his own signature, “L’Artigliere Antonio Tamburlin” (Gunner Antonio Tamburlin). It ends with a sentence that explains a great deal about him: “national service, in my view, really is a school of life. It was for me.”
The Befana’s cart
Back home, Toni started a family with Ada De Vecchi – they were married in the church at Sedico on 22 June 1968, with Bruno Boito as witness – and put his hands, quite literally, into the life of the Group. In January 1981 the Col Maòr thanks “our member Toni Tamburlin”, who “this year too” had wanted to give “a demonstration of his skill and flair, setting up a carnival float with a large stocking, on which the Befana (a live one) took her place”.
From then on, for almost forty years, the Alpine Befana of Salce arrives on Toni’s float. In 1983 it is a flower coming into bloom; in 1985 a float with a special mechanism that brings the boxes of sweets into view; in 1989 a little scene with “Marianna the goat” and a small Alpine mule, and behind the mule, the paper writes, is Toni himself. In 1991 his float carries a papier-mâché mule: the load comes off, a 75/13 gun goes on, and the little cannon “fires” confetti at the children. In 1997 his decorated cart is pulled by the tractor; in 2010 the Col Maòr simply writes that, “as always”, the little cart was set up by Toni Tamburlin. In 2017 the annual meeting honours him “for all the years of commitment in organising the Alpine Befana celebration”. “Well done, Toni!” the paper adds.
He had the hands of a man who knows how to make things. In 1996 the Col Maòr introduces him as a farmer; in 2012 it reports that he is doing well at sculpture and has built a scale model of the historic 105/14. For some years, with his family’s help, he also looked after setting up the nativity scene.
The pennant
In November 1981 Toni joined the Council of the Salce Alpini Group as one of the “young ones”, with Cesare Colbertaldo and Fulvio Bortot. From then on his name returns in every list of the Council that the Col Maòr publishes, up to the last one, in November 2017, for a three-year term he would not see out. On the 1988 Council he was “in charge of the Befana and outings”; in the 2004 photograph of the Executive Council he stands between Ennio Pavei and Bruno Boito, a couple of steps from Ernesto Barattin.
The role that made him a familiar figure came in 1992. Preparing for the national Adunata in Milan, Mario Dell’Eva notes in the paper: “In 1972 the standard-bearer was Primo Da Rold ‘Pol’, and this year it will be Toni Tamburlin.” From that moment, for twenty years and more, the Salce pennant moved at his pace: Adunate, rallies, anniversaries, ceremonies at memorials, members’ funerals. In 1996 an editorial note calls him “mule driver, standard-bearer of the A.N.A. Group of Salce”; in 2011 the Council names him “official standard-bearer”, and group leader Colbertaldo thanks him publicly “for the countless outings made with the Group’s pennant”. In 2012 the group leader’s annual report states that “the chief credit for our many appearances certainly goes to our standard-bearer Antonio Tamburlin”.
One scene sums it all up. At the annual meeting of 30 November 2003 the president of the Belluno Section, Arrigo Cadore, presents a ceramic plate on the Group’s behalf to Antonio Tamburlin, “for his commitment as standard-bearer”. In the photograph Toni, in his Alpino hat and a light-coloured gilet, shakes the president’s hand and smiles.
For Toni the pennant was no mere piece of cloth. In 2013, at the annual meeting, it was he who asked the Group to buy a new one; it arrived the following year, donated by the Zaglio family, “taking up the proposal… of our long-serving standard-bearer Antonio Tamburlin”.
The gunners of the 50th
Toni never left that national service behind, and never wanted to. In 2006 he was at Bassano for the reunion of the 37th, 38th and 50th Batteries, crouching in the front row among his old comrades. In the years that followed it was he who kept them together: the gunners’ sixth reunion, on 15 March 2009 at the Marcador di Mel, was owed to the “punctual organisation of our standard-bearer Antonio Tamburlin”, writes the Col Maòr; that autumn, at the annual meeting, the Group gave him a waterproof jacket. The reunions went on – the paper follows them in 2011, 2014 and 2017 – and in 2017 it is still Toni who organises, and who recalls where the 37th, the 38th and the 50th had come from.
Now and then he wrote. An account of the Triveneto rally in Mestre in 1996, which the editors deliberately left to “the simple but clear pen of a mule driver”; an outing to Lipizza in 2004; a piece on the historic Dolomites train in 2015, photographed from the railway overpass; and finally the rescue on the plateau in 1965. His writing always has the same qualities: precision, a thread of irony and a careful eye for animals and people.
San Fermo, family, the choir
Toni and Ada were from San Fermo, the hamlet of the Val di Siva bridge. The Col Maòr followed their family for decades: their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary “surrounded by their three children”, their daughter Paola’s wedding at the end of 1992, their fortieth, forty-fifth and finally fiftieth anniversaries, the last celebrated in San Fermo on 23 June 2018. In 2001 they had been struck by the greatest sorrow of all, the death of their son Gianpaolo, barely past twenty, who had himself been a volunteer in the Group’s Civil Protection team. Toni sang in the parish choir: years later the Group would remember him among “our Alpini singers of the parish choir”.
4 October 2018
Toni died on 4 October 2018 in an accident on the Riva del Boscon. He was still a councillor of the Group. The Col Maòr that month did not print a long obituary: it offered its condolences to his wife Ada, his daughters and the family, and then let him speak, publishing the story of the 1965 snow that Toni had handed in to the editors.
That is the best way to remember him: up to his ankles in the snow above Asiago, first on the right in the photograph, shovel in hand after a day spent digging a way through for others. Or, a few years later, at the head of the Group, with the Salce pennant held tight in his hands.
Key dates
| 1943 | Born; at call-up he is “of the 1st intake, though attached to the class of ’42” |
| November 1963 | Leaves for military service: basic training (CAR) at Boves, mountain gunner, gun crewman; then Bassano (50th Battery, “Pieve di Cadore” artillery group) and Alto Adige |
| January 1965 | With the 50th, goes to the aid of the 37th Battery, snowbound above Asiago |
| 22 June 1968 | Marries Ada De Vecchi in the church at Sedico |
| 1971 | On the “Un fiore al Visentin” march with Toni Fratta and Bepi Savaris |
| January 1981 | The Col Maòr thanks him for the Befana float: he had already been building it before then |
| November 1981 | Joins the Group Council; his name returns in the Council lists until 2017 |
| 1992 | Group standard-bearer at the national Adunata in Milan |
| 1996 | Signs the report on the Triveneto rally in Mestre |
| 1998 | Counts up, in the Col Maòr, the pennant’s 39 outings in a year |
| 30 November 2003 | Receives a ceramic plate “for his commitment as standard-bearer” |
| 2006 | At the Bassano reunion of the 37th, 38th and 50th Batteries |
| 15 March 2009 | Organises the gunners’ sixth reunion |
| 29 November 2011 | Named the Group’s “official standard-bearer” |
| 2013-2014 | Proposes a new pennant, donated by the Zaglio family |
| 25 November 2017 | Honoured for his years of work on the Alpine Befana; re-elected councillor |
| 23 June 2018 | Fifty years of marriage with Ada |
| 4 October 2018 | Dies in an accident on the Riva del Boscon |
In the MEMORIA network
- The Alpine Befana of Salce: the float and the little cart were his work
- Antonio “Toni” Fratta, fellow councillor and companion on the 1971 Visentin march
- Ernesto Barattin, “Nòno Ernesto”, beside him in the 2004 Council photograph
- Mario Dell’Eva, who announced the new standard-bearer in the Col Maòr in 1992
- San Fermo and the Val di Siva bridge, Toni and Ada’s hamlet
- The Col Maòr, where Toni wrote and where his story has been kept
Sources for this story
- Col Maòr no. 3/1971; no. 1/1981; no. 1/1982; no. 1/1983; no. 1/1985; no. 6/1987; no. 1/1989; no. 6/1990; no. 1/1991; no. 2/1992; nos. 1 and 6/1993; nos. 5 and 6/1996 (“Raduno triveneto a Mestre – Divagazioni di un conducente”); no. 1/1997; no. 1/1998 (“Lettera di un socio”); no. 6/1999
- Col Maòr December 2003, p. 10; no. 2/2004; no. 4/2006, p. 2; no. 2/2008, p. 5; no. 2/2009, p. 10; no. 4/2009; no. 1/2010; no. 4/2011; nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4/2012; no. 1/2013, p. 13 (“Come eravamo”); nos. 2 and 4/2013; nos. 2 and 4/2014; no. 2/2015; nos. 3 and 4/2017; no. 2/2018
- Col Maòr no. 3/2018, p. 6, “L’ultimo racconto di Toni” and “Soccorso negli altipiani”
- The Group’s annual reports for 2012 and 2014; 60th-anniversary book of the Salce Alpini Group (2024)
- Photographs: archives of the Salce Alpini Group and of the Col Maòr
If you have photographs of Toni with the pennant or with the Befana float, write to us: this story can still grow.
