For more than 20 years, Prof. Julius Fabbri has tried to gain international recognition of a time 49 years ago when an Italian private expedition built a Scientific Base in Antarctica.
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n 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 Argentinean 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.
The story is very long and WAP will not enter now into details, but the facts remain and make the whole story paradoxical. For sure everything is well known by the Argentine authorities who, with a gesture of sincere friendship and transparency could make it public!
After many vicissitudes, Cepparo’s expedition landed in Antarctica and the Base, was built, this is a fact. The Giacomo Bove Station, named after a 19th century Italian explorer, was inaugurated on January 20th, 1976.
Ham radio was performed at Giacomo Bove Camp as well, with the callsign I1SR/p (WAP ITA-Ø2) and QSL card to confirm the contacts, have been printed and sent.
The evidence says that Argentina did destroy Giacomo Bove Station when 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 did take the Base off 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. Prof. Fabbri strongly believe that, some if it, either hidden or forgotten, is still stored in a military facility in the Argentinian capital.
«I hope someone will tell the world where they are. It’s a mystery, no one wants to remember this cold case which I have been trying to open since 2003», Prof. Julius Fabbri said.
As a day job, Julius Fabbri (IV3CCT-II3BOVE) 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.
Prof. 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, Prof. Fabbri and his students built a full-scale model of the ruins of Giacomo Bove Base, and a few years later, he helped design a virtual 3D model of it.
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«Most people just laugh when I tell them what I know; they don’t believe its a true story, but there are official documents, publications and articles that confirm it, and I even met one of the mariners from the Argentinean navy who wrote a detailed account of this diplomatic incident,” Julius Fabbri says.