For more than 20 years, Julius Fabbri has tried to gain international recognition of a time 49 years ago when Italy built a secret base in Antarctica.
In late 1975, the Italian explorer Renato Cepparo and his 14 crew members were about to embark on a private expedition to Antarctica. The expedition had been given a clearance by the Antarctic Treaty System, and the crew members were prepared to establish Italy’s very first base in Antarctica.
Unfortunately, a few days before they were set to sail out from Montevideo, Uruguay, Cepparo received a letter from the Argentinian government. The letter informed him that Argentina had exercised a veto, and that Italy was no longer allowed to construct their base on the southern continent. Cepparo and his crew, though, were sure that they had their authorization in order, so they decided to start their expedition as planned.
But as soon as they left the port, an Argentinian military reacted to the slight. Over the radio, a military vessel warned the Italians that their ship would be shot, if they did not halt their expedition immediately.
So, on the radio, captain Cepparo said: “Okay, okay, we will go back to Italy. Abort the mission.” But, and this was important, he also said the words: “col perit!”, meaning “on the contrary”.
“Col perit!” was a code word, a secret message. It relayed to radio operators back in Italy, and across the world, that he had not meant what he said. That they were not heading for Italy but for Antarctica.
The high school teacher from Trieste
“In the article, please write ‘Col perit!’ with an exclamation mark,” Julius Fabbri, whose research is the basis of the intro above, tells Polar Journal AG.
As a day job, Julius Fabbri teaches science at a high school in Trieste, a city in northeastern Italy, but since he was young his hobby has been to be a radio operator. And in the Italian hobbyist radio operator community the story of Renato Cepparo’s Antarctic mission, a story that is otherwise not well-known, has become legendary.
Julius Fabbri himself first heard about it in 2003 when he made his first and only trip to Antarctica. While there, a colleague told him about it, and since then he has been researching the incident passionately and, some would say, obsessively.
Back in 2008, for instance, as a project in his science class, Fabbri and his students built a full-scale model of the ruins of base, and a few years later, he helped design a virtual 3D model of it.
“Most people just laugh when I tell them about this incident; they don’t believe it’s a true story. But there are official documents, publications and articles that confirm it, and I even met one of the mariners from the Argentinian navy who wrote a detailed account of this diplomatic incident,” Julius Fabbri told Polar Journal AG.
With 20 years of research, Julius Fabbri knows all there is to know about the incident; so much, in fact, that it can be difficult to discern the full story from the details he gets bugged down in.
In his correspondence with Polar Journal AG, he sent more than 20 emails; all full of photos and maps, independent research and historical documents, side stories and disagreements with peers. But when you look through the story and zoom out, Julius Fabbri’s story is unusual, action-packed, and, in the scheme of Antarctic history, important. The version told here is heavily abbreviated. If you are interested in more, there is this Italian documentary about the Giacomo Bove Station, as it was named, and a couple of years ago this five-minute video was also published. If that is not enough, Julius Fabbri himself will be eager to expand on the story for anyone interested.
A fossilized forest
With his code word, Cepparo had informed radio operators, and Fabbri believes, also the Italian government that they were going to Antarctica against the will of the Argentinians. Therefore, after the incident on the boat, the Italian consuls in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, went on sudden and convenient holidays. The Italian government simply observed from the sideline, Fabbri recounts.
So, without further disturbance, Cepparo and his crew sailed south. They arrived in Antarctica, at a location on the South Shetland Islands now named Italia Valley, and in three or four days they constructed a base with materials they had brought. The Giacomo Bove Station, named after a 19th century Italian explorer, was inaugurated on January 20th, 1976.
The crew then split into groups. One of the groups, which consisted of mountaineers, climbed six or seven peaks for the first time ever, while another group, consisting of divers, explored the seabed and discovered a lot of new life, according to Fabbri. The last group, which had stayed behind at the base, explored the geology in the Italia Valley, and discovered a fossilized forest.
“The Italians were the first to discover this millions of years old fossil forest near the Arctowski Polish Station,” Julius Fabbri said.
On February 12th, when their pre-planned missions were over, the Italian crew closed down for the season, hoping to return for the next Antarctic summer. But that would never happen.
Stored in Buenos Aires
In March of 1976, a coup d’état overthrew the Argentinian government led by president Isabel Perón. Around the same time, although connection to the Giacomo Bovo Station is uncertain, a small Argentinian postal airplane discovered the Italian base.
This confirmed their suspicion that Renato Cepparo had proceeded with his, in their eyes, unauthorized mission. As a consequence, in September of 1976, they sent an icebreaker to the South Shetland Islands to tear down the newly inaugurated base.
In the middle of the Antarctic winter, the Argentians destroyed the base in the same time it had taken to construct: three to four days.
The materials, which had just arrived in Antarctica, were transported back to Buenos Aires. Fabbri, who knows the names of the ships used to ship them back, believes that, to this day, some of the materials are still stored in a military facility in the Argentinian capital.
“They are either hidden or forgotten. I talked, for instance, to a museum director in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, who believed they are somewhere in Buenos Aires but that some of them may have been destroyed. I hope someone will tell the world where they are,” Julius Fabbri said.
“It is a mystery. No one wants to remember this cold case which I have been trying to open since 2003,” he said.
The 96th historical Antarctic site?
For two years, the Italian explorers did not know the fate of their base. That changed, when in late 1977, Flavio Barbiero, who had been vice-captain of the first expedition, arranged a new mission to Antarctica.
But when they got back to the Italia Valley, the base was gone. All that was left was some scattered rocks that had been gathered two years before to protect the station from wind.
“They came back to do more research but were terribly sad to discover that their base had been destroyed,” Julius Fabbri, who is a friend of Barbeiro, said.
In 1981, Italy became a member of the Antarctic Treaty System, and in 1985 they opened an official base on the other side of Antarctica called the Zucchelli Station. But the memory of the Italian pioneers who first conducted research in Antarctica has been largely forgotten, even in Italy.
For this reason, Julius Fabbri wants the Antarctic Treaty System to recognize the ruins of the Giacomo Bove Station as one of its historic sites. The list, which has existed since 1961, currently contains 95 sites, and the Giacomo Bove Station would be number 96.
“In 2025, the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting will take place in Milan where a lot of the radio operators who were in touch with Cepparo were located. This would be a great occasion to add it to the list,” he said.
“So far, they have ignored me, but I continue my fight.” “I continue out of a sense of justice, but also to keep the memory alive. Some people believe that in the future, it will be possible to live in Antarctica, and in that case it will be even more important to keep the historic sites there alive,” Julius Fabbri said.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG
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