An interview with VITO INDIVERI
We cannot but start this long conversation about the Cane
Corso with Vito Indiveri.
Two words to present him.
Everyone recognizes in Vito Indiveri the merit of having
been among those who first were able to gather together the "crumbs"
of the Corso that had remained in the South. His labor was long and tiresome,
but it was facilitated by his trade, that of a traveling salesman, and by the
"plazas" where he exercised it: the rural areas, with a certain
preference for the most remote regions; these two things, together, physically
brought him to places where a few Corsi still existed. Then his passion for the
dog, which filled his childhood memories, did the rest. That is how Indiveri,
without even realizing or planning it, at least at the beginning, made himself a
place in the history of dog-loving by having contributed to the recovery of a
breed that risked becoming exinct His research, conducted at first perhaps only
out of curiosity or because his desire to go back to having his grandfathers’
dogs, gradually became an endless source of data that played a most important
role in the census of the last remaining corsi and its consequent analysis.
I myself have been a witness of his industriousness in
promoting the awareness of this forgotten breed, conducted without begrudging
his information, evidence, documents and photos to anyone. A large quantity of
material has passed under my eyes; material which Vito had prepared and supplied
to this or that judge, this or that scholar, so that everyone, including the
ENCI, would become aware of a fact: the Corso was still there.
So I feel the need to affirm that among all those that
have had the honor of writing the first chapter of the modern history of this
breed, Vito Indiveri is due a place, he to whom we, the people of the South, owe
the preservation and the exploitation of several important breeders.
But let us listen to, in his own words, the story of this
singular experience.
-When did this beautiful story begin?
It began when I started to work as a traveling salesman,
20 years ago.
- Where does your interest in this breed come from?
I come from a family of carters that always had
pomeranians and corsi.
-Why?
Back then, the corsi of my ancestors were guard dogs: they
were used in the barnyard to guard the horses The people of my family were
carters and horse merchants; but these activities vanished with the development
of agricultural machines, and the Corsi vanished with them. The first time that
I rediscovered them was on a farm belonging to a certain Michele Padula in
Apricena, back in ’77 or ’78, and I found that in just that moment they were
"raw" cutting the ears of a few pups (which means without anesthesia,
nda); I recognized them and was surprised: they were really them, my
grandfathers’ dogs. At first I did not consider it important. Meanwhile, my
work carried me continuously here and there; I traveled extensively; I combed
every dairy farm, every farm. This is because, as a traveling salesman, I never
went into the cities, but I always traveled through the countryside, in the most
remotes areas, of all of Puglia, Molise, Calabria, Lucania, and all the way to
Sicily, Umbria, and Abruzzo. I began to realize, as I worked, that many of my
clients had Corsi. I remember the Calderoni, the Cillà, and many others in S.
Paolo, Apricena, Ordona, Cerignola, Orta Nova, Foggia, Lucera, S. Severo,
Manfredonia, Monte S. Angelo, Peschici, S. Giovanni Rotondo, and Sannicandro
Garganico.
- All in the foggiano region?
For the most part.
- And in the Barese hinterland?
Not many: a few in Andria, Corato, and Ruvo.
- And in the other provinces?
I found one in Mesagne in Salento, but they were always
old subjects.
- And in Basilicata?
I found some in Pietragalla, Celenza, Genzano. I also
found some in Campania in Colle Sannita, San Marco di Cavoti, Fogliano,
Castelvetro, S. Bartolomeo, and Ginestra.
- Did you always find these dogs in the hands of peasants?
Yes.
- And what did they do with them?
They made them work. In S. Giovanni Rotondo there was a
peasant, a certain Giuseppe Russo that had a bitch that he gave me to breed
with, called Sara. He used to use her to keep tabs on his sheep. The people of
Cillà used them as herd dogs to bring the sheep to pasture but also as hunting
dogs, for badger. Towards Abruzzo they were even used to hunt boar.
- In your opinion, was its use in hunting limited to
certain regions, or was it generalized?
It was generalized, because I also made investigations in
Calabria, Galato, Serra san Bruno, Mileto, and they used them both for badger
and for boar, except that in Calabria I did not have any luck because the
subjects I found were really at Christ’s feet. (meaning:
they were really in terrible condition," nda)
- Describe the morphology of the corsi that you saw back
then.
Clearly, it was not easy to find any homogeneity, because
each peasant made his dog in such a way as he was comfortable with. The first
thing that I noticed is that, given that the corso is an animal that suffers
from the cold, on the plains it had short fur, but in the more interior regions
(like S. Paolo Cividale), they always had a little more fur, very probably
because those were colder areas. So this was another thing they were bred for;
all the animals that live out in the open in cold regions, even horses, grow
more fur in the winter; it’s normal.
They all had a powerful musculature and great agility;
they were extremely adept at their job of guard dogs of sheep, etc. They never
showed any wrinkles, folds, or dewlaps; they were always quick and very agile.
- And the cutting of the ears?
That was always done, because, as the peasants would say,
when the dogs were let loose at night to guard, they could run into strays or
wolves, and so it was better for them to have their ears cut off.
- But did you find this practice everywhere, whether it be
S. Paolo or Mileto?
The ears were cut everywhere, with scissors, and then a
bit of ash and some olive oil. That was the system.
- Do you think that the peasants followed precise criteria
in selecting the corsi?
First of all, the corsi were never sold back then, and
there was a real sense of jealousy between the families that raised them and
many times, when a litter was born, only the pups that would have been useful
were kept and the rest were eliminated. The families mated subjects that
belonged to them, even though they were consanguineous, family by family. I
figured out the blood lines through the family names and through the regions;
the regions and the families were different.
- So you mean that a dog that came from a certain region
had no input from dogs from other regions?
Yes, every family mated between brothers, sisters,
fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts, etc.
- And didn’t such close consanguinity cause problems?
The peasants, and this is something that they told me
themselves, every so often exchanged pups at fairs, and brought in new blood. Or
they would even trade a piece of cheese or a sack of wheat for a pup.
I also discovered that when the Abruzzese came for the
transhumance they traded Maremma-Abruzzese dogs for the corsi. I found many
confirmations of this in the course of my research, all the way to Campo di
Giove in Abruzzo, because I was trying to recover a blood line belonging to the
Padula family, the first that I had discovered, and it was a Padula that showed
me the most recently born pups.
- So did the peasants follow any principles in breeding?
Work is what interested them; the peasants did not select
for teeth; but there were some who used to go hunting, like Alfonso Comer, and,
as they used the Corso as a holding dog, they always tended to have a dog with a
short muzzle and powerful mandibles, just to have a better hold. Furthermore,
the butchers who used the them to keep watch over swine and cattle had need of
those characteristics.
It is normal, then, that such a dog had to come with
slightly convergent cranio-facial axes; the predisposition for slightly jutting
teeth is also normal; it is normal, it is something natural.
- Do you feel confident that you can exclude the
possibility that some other breed with these morphological characteristics could
have entered into the Corso’s blood?
I can say that twenty years of work, I have never seen
neither a boxer, a rottweiler, a bull mastiff, or a mastiff on a chain anywhere
in the countryside. I never saw them in the countryside where there were Corsi.
Back then, among that particular stock that was in the
hands of genuine people, people who never spent a lira on dogs, they had one
litter a year to rejuvenate the "dog park" and that was it; these
people didn’t even know what a boxer was, to put it that way. The introduction
of foreign blood, if there was any, was in the "hot" areas, that is,
places where there were fights, because they were always trying to have the
fiercest dog, this, yes.
- How did you chose your breeding animals?
When I began my research, I tried to go back to the
genealogies. When someone talked to me about some Corsi I would ask him whose
offspring those dogs were. So I always established the origin. Also, when
foreign blood is introduced into the corso, it can be seen: a dog with slightly
convergent axes, a slightly protruding jaw and parallel lateral cannot be
invented if that is not what it already is. And then if someone insinuates or
wants to say that the breed has been reconstructed and not recovered, he or she
is wrong, because I combed house by house, and we made our selections in
parallel, especially in Puglia and always in collaboration with the SACC; they
worked in the north with the dogs taken from Puglia, and I bred our dogs from
Campagna. The hard work and effort that we still do today, the other Pugliese
breeders and I, are based on blood lines that had remained in Puglia, with the
express purpose of giving the breed a chance to survive.
- Do you feel that you can say that the corso that we see
today is the direct descendent of the dogs that were the hands of the peasants?
I still have some subjects that are direct offspring of
those dogs!
- Would you be able to say with the same certainty that
some moment or another, especially during the boom, there was never anyone who,
trying to be clever, mixed in the blood of another breed?
This happened because the corso is having great success,
even too quickly, and so there are people who, rather than selecting, care only
about sales.
- And does this phenomenon still exist, or, rather, has it
stopped since the establishment of the rules and standards?
It has been somewhat blocked now because, luckily, the
recognition has arrived, and with it these speculators have been more or less
put out of the picture. The first official judges have appeared, the truth is
coming out, and the judges judge based on the standard, based on how the breed
was and is. And so the speculators are disappearing and even I notice more
homogeneity at the expositions; things are getting better.
- What do you mean when you say, "the judge judges
the dog how it was and is;" that today’s corso, a part from the
improvements that have made it more attractive but have not changed it, is equal
to the one that the peasants had on hand?
Overall, that is the morphology: today’s dog presents
itself better: more cared for, more correct, better bred; robust and better fed,
the coat is more lustrous and more attractive, it is no longer the dog kept on a
chain, who was fed only wet bread, bran, and whey; today the dog is well fed and
there are notable differences, but the type is the same.
- And so we have recovered the Corso and we have not
created a different dog!
The dog has been recovered, in the true sense of the word,
even if there are people who forget that the corso was at that time on the brink
of extinction. I have to tell you that it was recovered just in the nick of
time, a few more years would have been enough and the breed would have been
lost. From the point of view of my personal experience this was possible because
I was obliged, and it was truly a difficult task, to seek out the dogs on the
farms; I would mate a bitch belong to one farm with someone else’s dog, and,
from that litter, for all the effort I had personally invested, they gave me two
pups, and with these I carried on the selection. From one farm to another I did
this work in every region. I had to mate some families’ dogs, males who were
already 12 or 13 years old, and I even had to help them mount the females.
the standard
- Good. So now we have arrived at the point in which,
based on what has been revealed by Morsiani, Perricone, and by all of the others
who had been delegated as observers, a standard has been drawn up. Do you
believe that there is anything in this standard that does not reflect the Corso
of the past, or do you rather think that it is an excellent working tool for the
breeder; essentially, how do you judge it?
I want to say that the standard was compiled based on
Pugliese dogs, who came from Puglia, on dogs whose bloodlines were Pugliese,
after which Morsiani, on these dogs, compiled the standard, continually taking
measurements because he wanted confirmations; measurements were taken in Bari,
Campobasso, Ostuni, and Foggia; Morsiani again took the measurements of other
subjects, seventy, more or less, less than a hundred, anyway, of those dogs
considered the most exemplary according to the investigations which had been
carried out, and these dogs existed because there were peasants who truly cared
about dogs; you will recall Bruno di S. Paolo, the dog of Comer, a dog that
would have been illustrative even today.
I want to say that the standard was not based on one dog,
and then that was it; many subjects were looked at and measured by high caliber
judges: Perricone, Vandoni, Morsiani, etc. I particularly remember the last time
Morsiani came down at his own expense to take the measurements of the dogs that
I had most recently discovered.; they came from Colle Sannita and belonged to
Jacobacci Giovanni, a mechanic who had an extraordinarily exemplary bitch,
singularly beautiful, and after Morsiani examined her (on that occasion he was
together with Casolino, Gandolfi, and Malavasi), she was photographed, then a
pamphlet was made up with the standard translated in four languages that was
distributed to the FCI judges on the occasion of the 1990 Verona Fair; the photo
of this bitch is on the pamphlet. Another episode dates back to 1988 when
Perricone took the measurements of my bloodline’s progenitor, Plud, and he
became very interested in him, and it could be seen that the dog shared the
sentiment, and he told me "Hold on to him dearly, he could be a
model."; Plud fit into the standard completely and even the judgment that
Morsiani gave at his registration reads, "an exemplary subject of the
breed."
- It can be said, then, that
a dog that had come out of the countryside back then was what the standard
describes today?
Yes. But in those days Plud was not the only rustic dog,
there were many of them.
- Do you think that, today, the breeders whom you have
spoken with are favorable or contrary to this standard?
They are all favorable because they, too, are continuing
the work that Malavasi and I have begun.
- So you are talking about the breeders in general and not
just those from the South?
But you have to see that the Pugliese breeders are the
ones who gave the material to all the others, and the Pugliese breeding,
qualitatively, is the one that took hold everywhere. The results speak clearly
and they are not the fruit of invention but of selection, work, and passion.
- What do you mean when you talk about selection?
When I talk about selection, I always intend conservation,
because I have never added dogs to the corsi, but I have always used country
dogs, farm dog; I only crossed subjects of the same families to strengthen a
bloodline; then I chose the best pups and carried on. I used the bitches at most
once or twice and then went on with the offspring, so that I would have
genealogies that I myself could remember, a sort of a personal pedigree, always
with the goal of maintaining the dog as it was. If the dog seems different today
it is only because it is better taken care of and better raised.
- But can the pureness of a dog be talked about when it
has been raised without reference rules?
I can say that eighty percent of the families that had
these dogs, if they kept them, here I am! And, even more so, some families might
have lost their female or male, and then things started to change, but there
were many families at that time that had dogs that were still pure, selected in
their own way; for example, no one thought twice about mating a tawny dog with a
black one.
- Do you think that today’s Corso is the same as
yesterday’s?
Today’s corso is nothing other than a dog that preserves
and carries within itself its ancestors, grandfather, mother, father, that were
yesterday’s corsi. Today’s corsi are the descendants of yesterday’s, we
did not introduce anything; in fact the difficulties that we encountered in
breeding came precisely from this fact, from having wanted to maintain the same
bloodlines; it would have been easier to do it with the introduction of
different blood.
- What do you mean by introduction?
I mean using subjects of another breed, but we never did
that, precisely because we wanted to keep the breed as it was. With introduction
there would have been the means to make a dog much more quickly, but instead
reliable stock continues to be worked on because it is that dog that needs to be
preserved; I am still breeding the direct offspring of rustic subjects. I can
cite Griso del Murgese, David del Dyrium, Rasputin del Dyrium, all of the rustic
dog Plud’s offspring, Bruno Junior, offspring of the Bruno of S. Paolo
Cividale.
- And is the height of today’s dog different from
yesterday’s?
The height is yesterday’s and it is what the standard
provides for.
- and the cranio-facial axes?
I am going to tell you again that the only differences are
esthetical, in the sense that today’s dog is better taken care of, while
yesterday’s ate only bread and water. That was the dog, the axes have always
been slightly convergent. I want to say something once and for all, at the top
of by voice; if the standard had not been correct, I would have flung myself
against everyone and everything. Honestly, I checked out all of the dogs myself,
one by one, house by house, farm by farm; I went and looked them in the mouth, I
was interested in understanding the dog’s teeth as they were, and that is what
the standard provides for today. And I can cite the names of the dogs and of
their owners. And then I challenge anyone to tell me that there were Boxers,
bulmastiffs, dobermanns, etc. in Puglia in the ‘70’s; I never saw any, at
least not in the countryside. Imagine then in those places where no one would
have thought that were people; I came across families in some areas in which you
would have said to me, "...but Vito, you’re taking this road, this
ravine, but are you sure that people live here?" Yes people lived there,
genuine people, who were still living with their horse in their bedroom.
- So should this standard be changed?
Absolutely not!
THE INTERVIEW ENDS HERE, BUT INDIVERI BEGANS TO SPEAK
SPONTANEOUSLY
When I began, no peasant gave you a dog just like that,
because they only had a few dogs. I committed myself to them, I would take the
bitch, from Lucera to Volturino, and I would mate it with a male, I would wait
for the bitch to give birth, I would go to the farm, de-worm the pups, to have
those two pups. This is the work that I was doing for the first five or six
years, I prepared all the bitches, and then I took two males, one coming from
Cerignola and one from Lucera, from the Rocco Cocco stock, and after having used
those dogs with predetermined bitches I gave the males back to the countryside;
in any case I had prepared some females and I needed a real progenitor for my
bloodline, a dog that I could put more faith in and who would guarantee me more,
and so, luckily for me, I happened to be in Manfredonia staying with the Leone
family, and there was a tawny bitch named Elsa belonging to Antonio Leone, a
grandson of Umberto, who was mated with a male named Bruno of the Ordona stock
belonging to Pinuccio Palumb,. Four pups were born, including Plud, the dog that
later became the progenitor of my bloodline. I often would go to visit Tonino
(Antonio Leone), trying to get this pup, but there was no way to have him.
Except that one day one of Tonino’s brothers went to the farm belonging to a
cousin of Umberto Leon, a certain Filippo Leone, in order to get some milk, and
ran over Filippo Leone’s dog. Filippo went to Tonino’s father and said,
"you have to give me another dog or we’ll lose our friendship." One
day, just at the right time, I came by Filippo’s farm, and seeing that they
had killed his dog, Tonino gave Filippo Plud. Eight months went by and this pup
had grown up, I was looking at him but I couldn’t take him, they wouldn’t
give him to me. Then Filippo decided to get rid of his cows and leave the
countryside behind to go live in the city. I happened to be around at that
moment, and I said, "Filippo, give this dog to me." I was looking at
it and I was saying, "this is the right dog, I have to make the breed here,
I’ve gotten prepared with the others, and this is the one I’m going to put
all of the bitches under. I gave Filppo Leone a bed-cover and a sheet, and he
gave me the dog.
This dog wouldn’t let me come close to it, it was eight
months old, but it was already a typical dog. I had it loaded into my car, I
came here, and it became my friend, it fell in love with me, it had a unique
intelligence; I trusted in that dog, because it was a descendent of the Umberto
Leone stock, I’ll explain how.
In Manfredonia a lot of things were said about a dog that
Umberto Leone had had in the 70’s; this dog was the same color as Plud, and
was named Saturno. Saturno was mated to a bitch that gave birth to Leone (dog),
who was a tiger striped male with white striping. Leone was given to the
Prencipe family of Manfredonia, and then I mated one of Plud’s sisters with
this male (Leone) belonging to the Prencipes, and kept two females, Liana and
Luana, which I used in selection. Leone came from the litter made by Saturno.
Later on he was mated to a bitch and produced Elsa, the mother of my
bloodline-progenitor (Plud) and Saturno II, (tiger striped) that is the father
of the dog, Rocky, that Umberto Leone has today, his direct offspring.
When I traveled around, I used my brain: when I went to
visit people with dogs I asked for the news about the most recent litters, where
they might be. I was pretty attached to Saturno I’s blood, the black one,
because, according to what the old folks told me, he was a very interesting dog,
and one day I asked Umberto were the last offspring of Saturno I were. He told
me that a certain Ciociola, a gasoline-station owner, had a female, and I had
given a male and a female to a field-guard in S. Giovanni Rotondo. We couldn’t
use the female because she did not reproduce; in S. Giovanni Rotondo the male
was dead, and the female had passed into the hands of another peasant, a certain
Giuseppe Russo. Giuseppe Russo gave me this female, but she was already of a
certain age, I used her twice, and I gave Giuseppe another young bitch.
I’m telling you all of this for no other reason then to
say that my theory about that time period was valid because Umberto was one of
those who had never selected his Corsi to sell them, but for his own reasons,
and he didn’t give anything to anyone, and the Leone family always exchanged
their blood amongst themselves. There were consanguineous dogs and so I said to
myself, "Since this dog has a lot of consanguinity inside of it , when I
mate it with what I’ve selected, the consanguineous one should dominate for me
a little bit, and I should be able to make the type more quickly," and in
fact these are things which have proven me right today.
So I want to tell you that "it’s pointless that
there are people who want to talk nonsense about this thing or the other; the
dogs that we have today are all the offspring of those dogs," and we’re
not too far from them; here we’ve arrived at most at having the grandfathers
and great-grandfathers. I still have some of the direct offspring of those dogs:
David, Griso, Rasputin. Where should we go further? But these people who go
around finding numbers? Come here and see, realize what’s going on, bring out
your proof..."
- What you’re trying to say is "I spent a lifetime
seeing where they were, seeing how they were, taking them from here, taking them
from there, and you come and say, ‘it’s not this but it’s that,’"
so does it make you upset when you it said that no one has done research in the
countryside?
It’s all regular!
I’ve done the research, more than what was necessary, I’ve
done the research!
Morsiani’s report on Plud:
Large sized subject, black, good, consistent bones, good
coat, exemplary head, slight convergence, good skull-muzzle relation,
well-formed, slightly clear eye, correct skull, bone form with a pronounce
frontal furrow (?), powerful muzzle, well-developed masseters without
exaggeration, excellent type, slightly prognathous, somewhat heavy neck with
light jowls. Approved for the pre-LIR, exemplary subject of the breed.
(Antonio Morsiani)