Schiaffi e Calci

Schiaffi e calci (slaps and kicks) or schiafferia co’ i cauci in Pugliese is a traditional southern Italian martial art that goes back to the late 18th Century. You can only kick below the waist and you wear normal shoes. Above the waist you can slap because old the old penal code striking with a fist was illegal but it was okay to slap the crap out of someone. But it’s nothing like karate or kick-boxing. You fight in a clinch. The traditional name for Sicilian unarmed combat is abbrazzari (embrace).

When you’re in a clinch you use trips, kicks, back heels and stamps to their legs, and upperbody wrestling, and slaps and testata (head-butting) to the head. You want to try and knock them down. It goes on until someone gives up. But if you was using it in self-defence you’re supposed to stamp on them before they get up or in the old days use your spurs on them.

Should Martial Art Schools be Regulated?

In Italy lots of martial arts are regulated by FIJLKAM, whereas in the UK and US there is no regulation of standards at all. If you have had no training but wanted to teach a martial art, say for example ju jitsu, that would be no problem: you could award yourself a black belt — 12th Dan if you want — get public indemnity insurance and start teaching tomorrow. So should martial art schools be subject to regulation?

Chris at Martial Development thinks not. His apologia for the existence of fraudulent martial arts schools is in summary:

1. They only exist because customers want them.
2. Participation is voluntary; dissatisfied students don’t have to train.
3. Shutting down these fraudulent schools wouldn’t stop other fraudulent schools opening in their place.

Whilst I accept that all three arguments are undoubtedly true, I’m not convinced that it necessarily means that regulation would be a bad thing. Child prostitutes only exist because customers want them, customers choose to use their services, and could stop doing so if they wished, and criminalisation doesn’t stop the practice. But no one in their right mind would accept that child prostitution ought to be legalised!

So the real question is whether any idiot ought to be allowed to set up shop and start teaching a martial art?

Frankly, if martial arts weren’t taught to children I would be inclined to say yes, because regulation doesn’t rid the martial arts of charlatans and many well established martial arts are predicated on fraudulent claims. But there are very obvious risks with charlatans teaching martial arts to children, and unfortunately many do.

When parents let their 12-year old daughter go off to her karate class, they no more consent to her getting knocked-out or her jaw broken in sparring, than they do to her getting fingered in the showers. They trust that the karate instructor isn’t a child molester and assume that the black belt around his waist means he is a competent instructor. Without regulation it is very difficult for a parent to ever ensure that a martial instructor is someone one they can trust with their child’s safety.

Of course regulation doesn’t stop martial art instructors teaching wholly unrealistic self-defence techniques, but that’s not the point — or at least not for me — it would at least establish a minimum standard of competence, which can’t be a bad thing.

16th Century Italian Polearms

The Italian Renaissance has no definitive start or finish date, but the Italian renaissance in warfare does, it can be firmly attached to the Italian wars of the C16th, or more precisely the Italian wars of 1494 to 1559. It was during the C16th that Italian polearms reached their zenith both in warfare and single combat. In the early C16th, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote about the use of the pike in warfare in Dell’arte della guerra, and Achille Marozzo wrote about the use of polearms in single combat in Opera Nova dell’Arte delle Armi, as did the Anonimo Bolognese in the L’Arte della Spada.

C16th Italian halberd

The reasons that the polearm became the primary infantry weapon during the Italian wars of the C16th was because of the advancements in armour technology and the reason they fell into decline in the C17th was due to advancements in firearms. The Italian wars of the C16th were initially dominated by pike and halberd but then came to be dominated by pike and shot. The heavily armoured gendarmes gave way to the partially armoured corazzieri.

C16 Italian Partisan

C16th Italian polearms were not the weapons of peasants, they were the weapons of the professional condottiero. Probably the most formidable was the Italian Roncone. Although it looks impressive, it enjoyed less success on the battlefield than the pike, halberd, partisan and polehammer but was lethal in single combat.

The Naginata

Naginata

The naginata (or Japanese glaive) is a far better weapon than the katana, although the blade was constructed in the same way and just as prone to chip, shatter and bend on impact. It proved to be a very effective weapon in the 12 Century against lightly armoured cavalry.

The naginata was abandoned by the Samurai as a weapon of war at the turn of the 17th Century, after which, it was primarily used for women’s self-defence, which is one of the reasons I like it — it’s a real pussy power weapon.

Like the Chinese Guan Dao and Russian sovnya, a naginata is a scimitar on a pole. The traditional length is 60 cm more than the users height. This  naginata could just as easily be used to decapitate, dismember, disembowel or castrate a would-be rapist as a katana, but it also has the advantage of reach.

Italian Pole Hammer

The 16th Century Italian Pole Hammer is around 1.4m and weighs about 2kg. The head is 22 cm and the hardwood haft is reinforced with steel langets. The triple pronged hammer face and fluted top and side spikes was designed to pierce plate armour and could parry and trap weapons.  The hammer face is also great for bludgeoning.

Fighting in Milanese Armour

Against someone without armour… you’re going to make a mess.

Tomahawk

In the mid-16th Century, the Apache were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, eating raw meat and drinking blood, and they still hadn’t discovered how to use fire. They were a primitive society living in the stone age, which is why the traditional tomahawk is a stone axe. The steel headed tomahawks used during the American revolution in the 1780s were actually British and French axes.

stone tomahawk

The tomahawk was never an effective close quarter weapon because you would have to stand in range and draw your hand back to strike, which makes it relatively easy to block, parry or grab. When the Franks were using the francisca in the 6th Century, they threw them in volleys from a 12 metre range.

francisca

The Death Touch

The “Death Touch” or Dim Mak (Dian Xue) as it is known in the Chinese martial arts is complete and utter bullshit. Touching, poking or lightly striking specific pressure points or series of specific pressure points on the body can no more cause death than masturbation can cause blindness – it’s a silly Chinese martial arts fantasy. Even more silly is the delayed death touch, where death supposedly occurs hours or even days after the “Death touch”.

The entire conceptual framework of the Chinese death touch is predicated on chi, qi or ki, which is said to run through 12 meridians in the body. The problem with this theory is that is these meridians don’t actually exist and the associated concept of Qigong or improving flow of qi through breathing techniques is also a load of rubbish. In fact, the entire body of traditional Chinese medicine (or quackery) is without scientific foundation.

Most of these so-called pressure points are nothing more than applying pressure to nerve endings. Pressing and poking the cervical plexus, brachial plexus, lumbar plexus, sacral plexus, solar plexus and coccygeal plexus will cause pain and discomfort but death!!!

A choke hold can cause unconsciousness and eventually death through cutting off oxygen supply to the brain causing cerebral ischemia and hypoxia, and a neck hold can cause unconsciousness, through pressure on the carotid sinus, capillaries and arterial baroreceptors, which cause blood pressure to rise in the head. But these are hardly a “Death touch”.

Dim Mak defenders often claim they can cause neurological shut-downs that will knock-out a person with a light slap to a pressure point, this is complete nonsense. There are far more nerve endings are in a girl’s clitoris, vagina and vulva than any where up her arm; so if we don’t have sensory overload having sex, we’re not going to having our arm gently slapped. But most of the Dim Mak knock-out demonstrations I have seen have involved the demonstrator striking the volunteer in the neck or head with considerably more force than a light slap!

The Lupara

The lupara is the ultimate traditional Sicilian close-quarter combat weapon. It’s a break-open, double barrelled, sawn-off shotgun, which was originally used by shepherds and goat herders to kill wolves and bandits  – hence the name lupara: lupo means wolf in Italian — but then became to be associated with the Cosa Nostra and Sicilian partisans, who both used it to carry out assassinations.

Despite being cheap and crude, the lupara is a truly awesome close-quarter combat weapon, which is just as deadly today as it was in the late 19th Century. Whilst the lupara might not be as small as a semi-automatic pistol, it’s still easy to carry and conceal on your person   — it can be worn under a jacket — and it can be drawn just as fast. But a lupara is far more powerful than any pistol and due to its wide spread of shot, you can shoot more than one person at a time and you don’t have to worry about taking an aimed shot.

Let me tell you, this matters a lot in a close-quarter combat. Combat shotguns, the military equivalent of the lupara, have proved to be more effective in CQB than a pistol. The Franchi SPAS-15 (seen here firing semi-automatic and pump-action) is still issued to the Italian army and the USMC have recently adopted the new lighter and smaller Benelli M4. Both weapons are perfectly legal to own in Italy.

No handgun has the power to knock someone over, and a single shot to the body is highly unlikely to kill instantaneously. So unless you hit with a clean head shot, which is not easy with a pistol in a close-combat situation, they’re unlikely to go down with the first shot. Admittedly a lupara doesn’t have the power to knock someone down either but it does have the power to put a much bigger hole in them, which increases your chance of killing them outright, and with the spread of the shot is wide enough that you can practically guarantee a head shot within a 5m range.

In Europe or America, if you fire a gun at someone, you’re most likely within 5m — probably less — of the person you’re shooting. Despite all the evidence that it doesn’t work at close-quarters, lots of combat pistol shooters still use the Weaver Stance instead of an Isosceles stance, and refuse to practice instinctive point shooting. Sight shooting is okay at distance but it’s no good for close-quarter combat. Just try shooting an attack dog let off the leash at 5m and you’ll realise how unrealistic all that bullshit is. Which is why Sicilian goat herders and shepherds came up with the lupara. As long as it’s facing in the general direction, it’s not going to miss at that range, and the ability to take out more than one person at a time is an obvious advantage.

In fairness, the one disadvantage to the wide spread of shot in close-quarters is the potential of accidentally hitting some poor innocent bystander, which is why my nunnu was never keen on using a lupara when he was carrying out an assassinations, although he used to carry one and used it to carry out kidnappings during WWII.

Sicilian Knife Fighting

Danza di coltello siciliano is a traditional Sicilian knife dance. It’s a mock knife duel done for entertainment but all that prancing about is based on the deadly art of scherma di stiletto siciliano or Sicilian stiletto fighting.

I learned scherma di stiletto siciliano from my nunnu (grandfather), and he learned off my bisnonno (great-grandfather). The cardinal rule of Sicilian knife fighting is to avoid the point of the enemy’s blade. So it places great value on scanso (voidance) and uses techniques, like sbasso (bending to ground), inquarto and intagliata (taking to left or right) and balzo (leap) to evade the enemy’s blade, which is characteristic of la scherma sicilana-Villardita (Sicilian fencing). It also places great emphasis on the invito (invite), insulto (insult) and contrattacco (counter-attack), but like all Italian styles of fencing it also adheres to the principles of tempo (time), misura (measure) and velocità (velocity).

But with my nunnu this wasn’t just a style of fencing or some family tradition. Like his father before him, he had used a knife in real combat against fascists, informants, bandits and people who insulted his honour. My nunnu preferred using a knife to a pistol because he thought it was more efficient at close-quarters and he could guarantee that no bastard surgeon was going to undo his handiwork. Don’t get me wrong, he was a sweet old man, who wouldn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, but he knew what worked and what didn’t in a knife fight.

He taught me to use a knife for both duellando (duelling) and difesa (defence): the skills are the same but the mindsets different. A knife duel is one on one and prearranged, whereas if you’re attacked, it can be any number against any number and next to no warning. Although he thought knife duelling was a thing of the past even in the 30s, he thought it was worth learning because a decent duellante knew how to win knife fight. As well as learning how to fight with a knife he taught me scherma di coltello e coppola (fencing with a knife and cap) and scherma di coltello e cappotto (fencing with a knife and coat), and how to use a cap or coat on its own to defend against a knife. I don’t wear a cap, so that was no fucking use to me, but on the other hand I’ve used a leather jacket wrapped around my arm with a knife on a few occasions on the streets of Europe.

La scherma di doppia daga (double dagger fencing) is popular in the Venetian style of scherma di Nicolotta but as my nunnu said, “you only need one dick to fuck a woman”, which was his way of saying, more than one knife is unnecessary, and to be honest, he’s right. It’s an unnecessary distraction.

One of the first things he taught me was to be indifferent to killing. He wasn’t being heartless but he just knew that when you’re in a knife fight, you can’t be afraid to kill or you’ll hesitate before you stab someone. He also taught me to show no mercy and to taunt my enemy with my knife. You often hear idiots talking about hiding the blade before attacking, but taunting the enemy with the knife is a good way to induce fear. He used to think the best time to stab a man is when he’s trying to surrender. He also thought cutting off some geezer’s nose in a street fight was reasonable. But to be fair, he never claimed to be an expert on the laws of self-defence.

Another characteristic of Sicilian stiletto fighting is the way the blade is controlled dalla dita (from the fingers), instead of dal polso (from the wrist) or dal gomito (from the elbow), like some styles. The fingers allow better control and quicker movements, especially with tondo mandritto (forehand horizontal cut) and tondo riverso (reverse horizontal cut) but the Sicilian style places a lot more emphasis on the stab than the cut. Now there’s a good reason for that: a cut requires a much longer range of motion, and requires two movements, whereas a stab only requires one. A cut also needs to be travelling at a much greater velocity to inflict serious damage.

My nunnu taught me to go for debilitating targets like the mouth, throat, spinal column, Jacobs, thigh or foot If you’ve never seen someone stabbed in the mouth, believe me it’s a fight stopper, and no man is going to do much fighting after he’s just been castrated, had his spinal column severed, or on the ground because he’s just been stabbed in the leg or foot.

The guard is another important aspect of Sicilian stiletto fighting, the stiletto is usually held in the right hand with the right leg and hand forward. The most characteristic of the Sicilian style is guardia dell’aquila, where the knife is held either at or above head level and is circled like an eagle ready to swoop. But there are other other characteristic guards, like coda longa e stretta, where the knife is held out to the right side of the body pointing upwards; coda longa e largo, where the knife is held out to the right side of the body pointing down; coda longa e distessa, where the knife is held behind the right hip pointing down; and guardia di faccia, where the knife is held out at shoulder level pointing at the enemy’s face.

Paranza

Paranza or bastone siciliano, as it is sometimes known, is the Sicilian art of staff fighting. The staff used in paranza, the ulivastro, is made from olive wood and fire hardened, and usually measures between 90-120cm. The ulivastro is a light, hard and durable weapon. It can strike metal or concrete without breaking.

I was taught paranza by my nunnu (Grandad) in the ’80s, he learned it in Sicily in the ’30s. It’s an ancient Shepherd fighting art designed to be used as a defence against bandits, wolves and wild dogs, but it also developed into a duelling system, and was used by Sicilian partisans. The most obvious characteristic of paranza is the way the ulivastro is circled above the head like an eagle ready to swoop (guardia dell’aquila).

The video below is an excellent demonstration.

As well as being an ancient martial art, paranza is a competitive sport called Liu Bo. There’s some dispute about whether turning it into a sport would ruin the art, which is why it’s called Liu Bo to distinguish it but as the video below shows: it’s still paranza.

My personal take on this is that Liu Bo is helping to keep paranza alive and ought to be taught in every school in Sicily. Being bashed about the head with a big stick never did anyone any harm.