Antonio Scarfoglio (1886-1969) was the son of Edoardo Scarfoglio and Matilde Serao, both well-known Neapolitan writers of the turn of the century and founders of il Mattino, the Neapolitan daily newspaper. Antonio became a reporter for that paper and was one of the three drivers of the Italian team that entered the 1908 New York- to-Paris car race. He wrote extensively about the race, first in the form of about 50 dispatches that he wired back to his paper as the race progressed, and then in a book published in 1910: Il giro del mondo in automobile (Around the World by Automobile). The Italian car, a Züst (then, simply, Zust), was one of six starters and one of the three vehicles that actually finished the race.

Some sources seem to have taken their information on the "Great Race" from the 1965 movie of that name, starring Tony Curtus, Jack Lemmon, and Natalie Wood. There are two glaring errors in that otherwise delightful Blake Edwards movie: (1) in spite of the original plan to do so, the cars did NOT drive through Alaska and over the ice- bound Bering Straits to Siberia; (2) none of the participants looked anything like Natalie Wood! Other than that, the real race was just as good as the film.

The race was sponsored by the Paris newspaper, Le Matin, and came hard on the heels of the spectacular Peking-to-Paris race of 1907. This one would be even better!—leave New York, drive to the Pacific, get to Alaska, cross the ice at the Bering Straits, drive through Siberia back to Europe and Paris. Thus, on February 13, after an ocean voyage from Le Havre, the Zust met the other entries at the Times building in New York City for the start. In his book, Scarfoglio says that the cars looked as if their manufacturers had built bits and pieces of national psyche into their vehicles: the German Protos was short and squat, the French cars were fragile, and the Italian Zust was "slim and nervous."

(Slim and nervous or not, the Zust was a good example of emerging auto technology of the day: it was model 28/45 HP—a model produced from 1905 through 1908—, four cylinders, chain drive, top speed of 60 mph.)

A lap around the Times building, a few national anthems, cheering crowds, a shot from a starter pistol and they were off! In the Zust with Scarfoglio were the main driver, Giulio Sirtori, and the mechanic, Heinrich Haaga. As they set off, Scarfoglio wired the Mattino that he expected to reach Paris on July 15. That estimate was a gross miscalculation of the difficult journey ahead.

Driving north from New York City, all of the car have problems: they stop and put snow chains on, often they lose the road because of the snow, and they have to dig their cars out every few hundred meters. Scarfoglio complains that the Americans seem to be spending all their money on trains and nothing on roads. (Indeed, the road were nothing like the good French road that all six cars had jousted along from the offices of Le Matin in Paris on the way to the docks in Le Havre a few weeks earlier.The first coast-to-coast road in the US, the Lincoln Highway, would not open until 1913.) The day after the start, Scarfoglio finds a newspaper that reports that "the drivers expect to make the 3,000 mile crossing of the US in 15 days." Scarfoglio says, "...and to think that we really believed that when we started." (Apparently, the drivers had based their estimate on the record time of two weeks, set during the summer (!) by a light, air-cooled Franklin two years earlier.) In spite of the problems, Scarfoglio's car covers 350 km in the first three days; one car, however, the Sizaire, has already dropped out.

As they head toward Chicago, the cars are still within hours of one another and often change the lead. They pick up help wherever possible; friendly mechanics and scouts who bring them fuel—often on horseback—from the few pumps scattered along the route; the US Flyer gets some spare parts from Thomas dealerships. Scarfoglio's dispatches are crisp and to the point. His later book, however, starts padding with would-be de Tocqueville comments on America and its inhabitants (essentially, they are uncivilized from living too long in the wilderness. Also, they spit a lot). He would repeat such observations about all parts of the world as he moved along.

Approaching Chicago, the temperatures drop to -26° C. (-13 F.), and all the cars at some point have to be towed by animals. Back home in Naples, il Mattino publishes a race supplement, a large map of the route.The map is hand-drawn from an imaginary point over the north pole looking down at that part of the northern hemisphere of interest for the race; thus, the reader can trace the course of the race in a circular, clockwise fashion from start to finish.

Scarfoglio leaves Chicago on March 1.The cars start to spread out. The Thomas Flyer is leading as they head into the plains. Another French car, the Motobloc, gives up the ghost. Now there are four.

In the month of March, in Nebraska, all the cars at some point "ride the rails". That is, while the rules prohibit loading your car onto a train from one point to another, nothing says you can't get up there on the track and straddle one rail, one wheel on the outside dirt and the other on the railroad ties between the tracks. It's bumpy, but it's better than no road at all. The NY Times from March 21 reports that the Italian team had to fight off a wolf pack near Spring Valley, Wyoming, shooting and killing 20 wolves before the rest of the pack of about 50 animals dissolved into the hills. By the end of March, the team is in Goldfield, Nevada, "a town," says Scarfolgio, "of wood and canvas in the middle of a desert."

The Zust crosses the Rockies, and moves down toward Los Angeles. Scarfolgio complains that the leader, the Flyer has violated the rules by using a railway tunnel to avoid the difficult climb and descent. In Death Valley, he spots four human skeletons by the side of the trail.The Italian car gets to Los Angeles in the first week of April after a six-week trip across the US (three times longer than planned). Scarfolgio writes that the Flyer has again cheated by turning north earlier than agreed upon in order to make for San Francisco and the ship to Seattle and Alaska.

By this time, Scarfoglio, the German car and the one remaining French car are days behind the Thomas Flyer. They race for San Francisco where George Schuster, the American driver, is already embarking for Valdez, Alaska. Scarfoglio embarks in pursuit but then writes disappointedly from Seattle that the Italian team had received a telegram from the Zust company telling them to abandon the idea of Alaska and crossing the Bering Straits; the Thomas flyer, in the lead by some days, had turned back because the thaw had set in, making a crossing impossible.

All the cars ship to Yokohama, Japan, and cross to the west coast on roads that are so steep and full of tight hair-pin cutbacks that the cars have to be picked up and carried through each turn. They cross to Vladivostok by a two-day ferry trip. The German team, led by Lt. Col. Hans Koeppen of the 15th Prussian Infantry, is actually the first to land at the Russian port. Then, the Italian and French cars disembark from the same ship. A few days later, the Thomas Flyer, delayed because of the Alaska detour, shows up. Suddenly it's a race again.

On May 15, Scarfoglio writes from Vladivostok that they are all wasting days waiting for the Russian bureaucracy to let them leave the city. Scarfoglio says that the De Deon has dropped out. There are just three cars left. Also, the Italian chief driver, Sirtori, is called back to Italy. Scarfoglio and his mechanic will continue without him. On May 21, Scarfoglio writes that the Thomas and the Protos left that morning in the driving rain.

The German car picks up a 15-day penalty for having used a train from Ogden, Utah to Seattle in the United States (there were no spare parts for the Protos in Utah). Rather than spot the other cars the 15 days in Vladisvostok by waiting out the penalty, the Protos leaves Vladivostok together with the American car; Koeppen says that even if he doesn't "win" the race, he will cross the finish line first (which he does, many weeks later, in Paris, four days ahead of the Flyer). For reasons that are not clear—Scarfolgio says they had to wait for a telegram from the Zust company for permission to continue—the Italian car waits three weeks, until May 5. The Italian car will never again be in contention, but now the point is just to slog on and finish.

The plan of all three cars: make for the Manchurian railway and straddle a rail, as they did in the Western US, or drive on the access roads still in use by construction crews (the Trans-Siberian railway would not be completed until 1913). The route: through Manchuria and Mongolia and on to Irkutsk, across Lake Baikal, on to Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, across the Urals into European Russia, on to Moscow, St. Petersburg, along the Baltic into Poland, then Germany and home to France.

> From Vladivostok to St. Petersbug is about 6,000 miles as the crow flies. Crows, however, are well above the rain and mud of Siberian spring, bandits, very wild animals, and a few close calls with the Trans-Siberian train. And crows never have to send out for gasoline. All of the cars carry guides. In early July, il Mattino runs a front-page spread on the race, a dispatch from Scarfoglio called "Leaving Manchuria". They are now headed for Lake Baikal, beyond which they start picking up decent roads, helped along by better weather. The Zust is welcomed in Moscow by the Italian ambassador to Russia. Near St. Petersburg, their car frightens a horse drawing a cart; the animal bolts and throws a young boy riding in the cart to the ground. The child dies and Scarfoglio and Haaga are in a Russian jail for three days before the authorities decide that they are not responsible. They are sent on their way.

They are given are a hearty welcome in Berlin, and on September 17, six weeks behind the other two cars, they roll into Paris after seven months. Officially, the American Flyer finishes first, the German Protos second, the Italian Zust third.

Besides Scarfoglio's book, a German version of the race was published by their main driver, Koeppen, as Im Auto um die Welt (Berlin 1909), and the American driver, Schuster, wrote The Longest Auto Race (pub. 1966). They all have their own versions and conclusions. The Germans are convinced that they won, and the Americans emphasize that they kept it a real race by chivalrously stopping along the way in Siberia to help drag the German Protos out of the mud. Scarfoglio writes, however, that the Protos and Thomas had engaged in wholesale fraud by using replacement cars every 1000 kilometers on the long Siberian stretch, vehicles apparently shipped to them along the way. It isn't clear how that might have been done. The whole idea sounds self-serving and implausible.The Italian car finished the most difficult automobile race in history and that should have been enough. No sour grapes needed. In any event, the Thomas Flyer is now on display in Harrah's Automobile Collection in Reno, Nevada; the German Protos is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich; some sources claim that the Zust was destroyed by fire after a road-show exhibit in London shortly after the race. Other sources say it was salvaged and is currently under restoration in Canada.

In comparison with the 1907 Peking-to-Paris race, in which four out of five starters finished (the winner in 61 days, the last car just two weeks behind), the 1908 event turned into an interminable ordeal that outran public interest after the first few months, with updates usually appearing only as single paragraphs in il Mattino by mid-way through the race. It did, however, generate interest in the United States in improving the system of roads, interest that led to the construction of the Lincoln Highway a few years later.

Scarfolgio returned to his reporting and within a few months of the end of the race was reporting on the devastating earthquake in Messina in December, 1908. In June of 1909, he reported on the infamous massacre of Armenians in Adana, Turkey; in 1910 he published a widely-read interview in the Paris paper, 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 he was responsible for producing Italy's first newspaper photo supplement section, il Mattino Illustrato, using the new rotogravure printing process. He and his brothers had taken over il Mattino upon the death of their father in 1917, but were ousted in 1928 by the Bank of Naples in what amounted to a "hostile takeover."

Antonio Scarfoglio lived through an age of great change. When he was born, the nation state of Italy was only 15 years old; he lived through its growing pains and two World Wars; he saw the rise of Fascism and Communism; he was born before the Eiffel Tower was completed, when the steam engine was king and powered flight a fantasy; and a few days before he died in 1969, his old newspaper, il Mattino, was running photos of Armstrong and Aldrin rehearsing the first moon landing.

Interestingly, at his passing il Mattino published—as paid-for obituaries—only two small notices, one from his immediate family and the other from colleagues at the Union of Neapolitan Journalists, which he had helped to found decades earlier. (The lack of attention given his death by his old paper was perhaps the result of lingering hostility between the paper and Scarfoglio family.) The crosstown rival paper in Naples, il Roma, on the other hand, ran a long and laudatory article. "Totò Scarfoglio has died," it proclaimed, using the nickname of endearment for "Antonio." It praised his early reporting of the 1906 eruption of Vesuvius, the Great Race, his work abroad in France, and in general lauded him as a jovial, energetic man of extreme likability, someone who took advantage of being a contemporary of the greats of young Italy, the likes of D'Annunzio and Crispi, in order to help shape early Italian journalism.

Amid all that, who knows if, towards the end, Antonio Scarfoglio didn't harbor whimsical thoughts about the modern world, maybe something along the lines of, "Yes, going to the moon is some pretty fine technology and, no doubt, a great adventure...but you know something?...I drove a car around the world in 1908."

photo credit: The photo (by Wikipedia user, Tmorrisey) is of what claims to be the restored 1908 Zust car that made the trip.