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he first spark to revive the interest in the Cane Corso was a letter written by Pablo Petrelli and published in 1978 in the ENCI1 Official Gazette, number 6: ‘I Nostri Cani’ In December that year, in ‘I Nostri Cani’ there was an article by Paul Breber which described the subject found in La Puglia, also thanks to the description found in a letter by Professor Bonatti on December 2, 1973. In that letter a short-haired dog was described, different from the Neapolitan Mastiff, added Professor Ballotta, famous Schnauzer breeder who had seen several in the rural areas of La Puglia. In May 1979, Stefano Gandolfi who was barely sixteen realizes, thanks to Breber’s writings and pictures, that this old Italian breed has survived two World Wars. This discovery and the idea of the genetic recovery of the breed became his main goal. He involved in his project Giancarlo and Luciano Malavasi, renown German Shepherd breeders, sharing with them all the passion and burning enthusiasm that encouraged him. The three of them got in touch with Breber who spared no efforts in order to give them all the information he had and expressed his wish to go with them to La Puglia and to the places where he had found the first specimens and where the first couple had been put together, heading thus towards the recovery of the breed (On 14/11/75 from ALIOT, grey and MIRAK, striped, 7 puppies were born. Amongst them was the striped female BRINA who with PICCIUT, striped, give birth to 10 puppies on the 15/01/78). On September 1979, Pablo Breber, Stefano Gandolfi, and Luciano Malavasi met in La Puglia in order to locate and choose the first subjects with which to select the breed and start the recovery. First approximations During the first visit to La Puglia, from Mantova, the attention of the three enthusiasts (Breber, Gandolfi, and Malavasi) revolved around six specimens, 2 males and 4 females born in the 1975 and 1978 litters, all of them size medium to large, with mesomorph constitution and developed

musculature. The specimens were all noble, athletic, and fierce, very satisfactory in their molosoide structure, with, however, an absolute absence of the excessive heaviness of the Neapolitan Mastiff and totally different from it. These specimens were very similar in structure and could be differentiated in two types when examining the head. ALMA and COCAB, born in ’78 from BRINA, had the alaneggiante head and the scissor teeth. The mother, however, had a shorter muzzle and an inverted scissor bite. TIPSI, another of the females, again daughter of BRINA, was described by Gandalfi thus: “she had a long face, a little over one third of the length of the head with a group of teeth closed in inverted scissor. The head, as a whole, was noble and proportioned, a short and harmonious female, alert, fierce and lively. A key female in the breed recovery programme”. To these four females the male TAPPO, also a son of BRINA, was added. Slightly prognate, with a highly respectable musculature, tawny coloured, it was

going to be given as a gift to some friends of Breber in Foggia. They completed the six specimens by adding PICCIUT, the striped male, father of ALMA, COCAB, TIPSI, and TAPPO. The owner, Armando Gentile, said about the son that he presented an even more typical head, with a muzzle that amounted, as in the case of the daughter TIPSI, to a little more than one third of the head. All these dogs had slightly convergent craniofacial axes in common. The recovery The specific difficulty for the recovery of the breed arose in this first transfer: there were many of them and there was some reluctance on the side of the owners to whom the specimens born of the first litter produced by Breber had been entrusted who utterly lacked any cynophile culture.