Giovanni Benfratello

Giovanni Benfratello was a member of the Palermo Fencing Club in Sicily winning his first tournaments on the island in Palermo (1903) and Catania (1905). After that he focussed on sabre beating the young Nedo Nadi to win the Genova (Genoa) tournament in 1910. In the following year he represented Italy for the first time abroad succeeding in the sabre team event of the “Grande Semaine des Armes de Combat“ in Wien (Vienna). He was also a member of the Italian team that won the team event with the épée.

Benfratello was selected to compete at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm and was deployed in the sabre team, which only placed a disappointing fifth. After a clean sweep in the first round of the individual event, he was eliminated in the next round, the quarter-final. During the next years he competed with less success. Then the war basically terminated his international fencing career. Occasionally, he appeared in tournaments in Italy, when he was already 40 years old but rarely making the top 10. The Italian Fencing Federation awarded him the gold medal for lifetime achievement in 1963.

During the 1912 Olympic Games, Benfratelli was the correspondent for the “Corriere di Sicilia” and later wrote a book about fencing, “La scherma di sciabola”. In 1906, he graduated in law and later focussed on tax matters chairing, for instance, the Palermo Tax Commission.