Scarfoglio Antonio (w2921)

Antonio Scarfoglio (1886–1969), Neapolitan journalist and author. Antonio Scarfoglio was the son of Edoardo Scarfoglio and Matilde Serao, both well-known Neapolitan writers of the turn of the 20th century and founders of il Mattino, the large Neapolitan daily newspaper. He broke into reporting with a dramatic account of the devastating 1906 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. In 1908 he was one of the three-man team that manned the Züst, the Italian entry in the six-car around-the-world automobile race, known as The Great Race. The Italian car was one of the eventual three finishers. Scarfoglio wrote a book about that exploit: Il giro del mondo in automobile (Round the World in a Motor-Car) published in 1909.

He then reported on the 1908 Messina earthquake, and in June of the following year reported from Adana, Turkey, on the infamous massacre of the Armenian population. In 1910 he published a widely read interview in the Paris paper, Le Matin, with empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III; he co-founded a film journal, L'arte muta (The Silent Art) in 1915 and in 1924 was responsible for producing Italy's first newspaper photo supplement section, il Mattino Illustrato, using the new rotogravure printing process. In general, he is viewed as one who took advantage of the good fortune of living in the same age as prominent literary and political figures of the young nation-state of modern Italy such as D'Annunzio and Crispi in order to help shape early Italian journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Scarfoglio 

THE DEPARTURE 

A hurried good-bye through the carriage window ; 
the train is off; and we are definitely launched on our 
prodigious adventure. There are three of us in the 
compartment, Haaga, Sirtori, and myself, as yet un¬ 
known to each other. Until this moment we have 
not had time to think. We have lived in a state of 
exhilaration and frenzied excitement which seemed to 
paralyse our mental faculties. For the last fortnight, 
occupied with all the minute but indispensable details 
of the preparations, we have lived in a sort of trance 
from which we awake suddenly in the railway carriage, 
and think . . . Shall we ever return ? Whither are 
we going ? The mind forms a picture of a wide, easy 
road, a happy journey across America, then—farewell 
to everything; silence for months and months; miles 
and miles across a desert of ice. In face of the hard 
fact of this tremendous journey the happy self-compla¬ 
cency which enabled us to meet all objections, all 
suggestions of difficulties with a shrug of the shoulders, 
comes to a sudden end. We are now convinced that 
nothing will arrive in time, that the petrol will be left 
half-way; that the provisions will be mislaid; that, in 
fact, all the labour spent on every minute detail of the 
preparations has been wasted and is destined to be of 
no avail. . . .