The volume by Roberta Rodelli and Gianluca Casagrande, dedicated to the logbook of the 1929 Arctic expedition of the Heimen-SUCAI, is now available in the Memorie della Società Geografica Italiana:
Roberta Rodelli, Gianluca Casagrande, Gianni Albertini’s Logbook and the Expedition of the Heimen-SUCAI, Memorie della Società Geografica Italiana, XCVI, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana, 2026
The book presents and analyses the Logbook of the Arctic expedition of the ship Heimen-SUCAI, led in 1929 by the explorer and mountaineer Gianni Albertini. The expedition, which took place between Norway, Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, had as its main objective a final attempt to search for the six members of the crew of the airship Italia who had disappeared the previous year. Alongside this mission, the expedition also carried out observation and scientific research activities.
The volume is the result of a study, transcription, translation and historical-geographical contextualisation of the logbook preserved by the Società Storica Lombarda ETS in the Albertini family archive. The document, kept by Albertini as commander and by Piero Zanetti as second-in-command, is published in the original Italian text with a transcription and an English translation, making a source of great interest for the history of Arctic exploration accessible to an international audience.
The publication also reconstructs the organisational, geographical and human framework of the expedition, relating the logbook to Albertini’s 1932 memoir, La Heimen-SUCAI nei mari Artici, and to other documentary, cartographic and audiovisual sources. Particular attention is also devoted to the value of the logbook as a personal, literary and geographical testimony of an extreme experience lived in an Arctic space still perceived at the time as a frontier.
This work is part of the research activities of GREAL – Geographic Research and Application Laboratory dedicated to historical geography, the digital enhancement of sources and the study of explorations in polar environments.
Bibliographic Reference
Roberta Rodelli, Gianluca Casagrande, Gianni Albertini’s Logbook and the Expedition of the Heimen-SUCAI, Memorie della Società Geografica Italiana, XCVI, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana, 2026.
eBook ISBN: 978-88-85445-32-1
Print ISBN: 978-88-85445-33-8