"If the navigation was possible, not only a great shopping street were opened, the business of men, allowing a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, relatively short, which would replace half of the circumnavigation globe, but they put in the mouths of large rivers joining Siberia to Europe and America, giving value to plant products and minerals of a vast territory, held, weather conditions, almost entirely out of the inhabited world "
Giacomo Bove was born in Maranzana (AT) April 23, 1852. He lived his childhood among vineyards, forests and fields in the area between T and Acqui Maranzana Herms, where he studied below. Bove dreamed of the sea and his greatest aspiration was to be able to attend the Naval Academy. to it, however, were then allowed only the nobles and / or rich. Bove's father was not rich, but came to an agreement with management: his family would pay for providing the right wine to the tables until the end of the studies. Out brilliantly from the academy in 1872 he joined the Navy as an officer.
Promoted midshipman, James, was sent in the corvette "Governolo" through a travel-expedition, between 1873 and 1874, will unfold in the Maldives, the Philippines, China, Japan, with particular attention to Borneo, then divided between the English and Dutch.
the beginning of 1877 it was learned that the Swedish geographer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld was about to groped 's opening of the passage by sea in the north-east. This was one of the last great geographical problems bequeathed to his generation. The question was whether a point in the north of Western Europe, particularly the coast of Scandinavia, it could be by sea, skirting Russia and Siberia, reaching the Bering Strait, where it touches the Asia America .
ll July 4, 1878 the "Vega", a steam whaler, sailed from Gothenburg in Sweden, with best wishes from all over Europe. After traveling for months and months between ice and storms, knowing that first of many ships were wrecked and their valiant explorers lost their lives in this research, the explorers, "they launched" the passage of the Northeast. The expedition was an immense success and fame came to James suddenly, with gold medals and awards throughout Europe.
Bove, is now taken by a real own obsession with trips' exploration. After having been denied by the Italian government funding for exploration in Antarctica, Patagania leads an expedition to the south and Tierra del Fuego, thanks to a grant from the Argentine government.
The expedition left Buenos Aires on December 17, 1881 and carry out fruitful explorations of the coast of Patagonia and the almost unknown island states.
landed in Punta Arenas in April, the expedition moved on the little schooner "San Yose", but was wrecked in a storm at the co is of Tierra del Fuego (May 1882). After
In 1886 he was commissioned by the Italian Government to explore the basin of the Congo up to Stanley Falls, to report about the conditions of that vast basin that opened to European penetration.
This trip, however, it will undermine the deeply physical from this enterprise, in fact, Bove returned exhausted and sick. Being unable to resign themselves to a new sedentary lifestyle, that was supposed to represent undoubtedly a humiliation for him, and began to suffer from mental disorders, On August 9, 1887 Bove trenatacinquenne commits suicide in Verona. For
Aqui Terme, where he is buried, he has been named a street and a monument placed in the public park of the city in 1908 by the sculptor Eugenio Baroni.
