TORRE CHIARUCCIA was a 15 m height
stonework Tower by the Thyrrenian Sea, situated in a favourable
location at Capolinaro Cap in Santa Marinella (province of Rome) and
next to Civitavecchia. The Tower was part or the Roman Imperial
Communication System and it was rebuilt in the XVI Century by Pope
Pius V at the time of the Lepanto sea battle as watch tower against
Saracens incursions.
Till 1929 the tower and its surrounding area belonged to the Italian
Navy then it was entrusted to the Italian National Research Centre –
CNR whose President Guglielmo Marconi with two company engineers,
Gerald Isted and Settimo Albalustro conducted experiments on
microwaves and blind navigation with ships entering the harbour of
Civitavecchia, radiomobile telephone and radio localization.
In 1932 as result of Marconi
demonstration of duplex radiomobile telephony at Torre Chiaruccia,
the Vatican authorities ordered a telephone link to be installed
between the Vatican City and the Pope’s palace at Castelgandolfo,
near Rome, the inauguration was in January 1933 this was the first
microwave mobile commercial telephone link in the world.
In 1935 Marconi asked his company's
factory in Genoa to build him a small transmitter of 50-centimetre
wavelength, with a receiver to match.
In April 1935, while testing
them at Torre Chiaruccia with Luigi Solari, he bounced radio waves
off his car, driven back and forth by his chauffeur, and then off a
circling aircraft. At every stage, the British parent company was
kept informed of these experiments.
In December 1935 the British
government asked the Marconi company to design and manufacture the
transmitting 'curtain' antenna arrays for the first five 'Chain
Home' radar stations, covering the Thames Estuary and approaches to
London. In May 1937 came an order for providing similar arrays for
20 additional stations. Without the protection given by these radar
stations, the Battle of Britain three summers later would almost
certainly have been lost.
During WWII the Chiaruccia Tower was blown up in 1944 by the Nazi
troops on their retreating.
In 1957 thanks to the rebuilding of the
laboratory at Chiaruccia Tower the MARCONI National Radioelectric
Centre conducted researches about radio ray propagation of the
ionospheric echoes.
Nowadays it is a metereologic station of the Italian Air Force.
The Town of Santa Marinella, thanks to Prof. Livio Spinelli and
General Guido Martinelli have made a Project of rebirth of the
MARCONI National Radio Electric Research Centre
– CRESM, and the reconstruction of the MARCONI Chiaruccia
Tower with the cooperation of the Radio Amateurs from all over the
world, eachone of them could support paying the cost of a stone: on
which they could engrave their name and sign. The project includes
the Research Laboratories, the Ham Radio Station, the Marconi
Memorial and Museum and the Antennas Park because Marconi was the
father of Radio as well as Antenna. Princess Elettra Marconi will
donate to the Centre at Torre Chiaruccia two large parts of the
Electra Yacht now at the Italian Space Centre of Fucino.
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i0KHP Patrizio, manager IY0TC at
Torre Chiaruccia - 2001 |
Norman G4USB one of the
IMD founder, in Bologna for the Centennial celebration
of Radio, next to Patrizio i0KHP and Alberto iK0CNA
Right: the certificate of the first IY0TCI radio
transmission in 1989
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Since 1989 thanks to Patrizio Ciancarini i0KHP, Marconi
Historian and Manager of IY0TC, the ARI Ham Association of
Civitavecchia organizes the Radio Amateur Activities at Torre
Chiaruccia, with the special Marconi sign IY0TCI (the third in
Italy after IY4FGM and IY1TTM) issued by the Italian
Communication Ministry. Since the Ham Station IY0TCI has always
participated to the
International Marconi Day
to be held on Saturdays next to 25th April, birth
date of the father of radio.
Photo (1927) dedicate from Guglielmo Marconi at Radio Club of
Civitavecchia. The historic
IY0TC QSL card
Due to security reasons in the last years the Area of Torre
Chiaruccia was off limits and it was not possible to locate our
Ham Station IY0TCI therefore we aired from outside Torre
Chiaruccia. In 1997 to better operate in telegraphy we changed
the original sign in IY0TC.