Giovanni dell'Arco

Registration with the SCA College of Arms

Argent, a bow reversed vert

Name and device registered November 1996

Persona

Giovanni dell'Arco joins us from twelfth century Bergamo, at the time an independent comune in what is now the Lombardy region of northern Italy. Giovanni was a field warden and an archer in the Bergamascan contingent of the Lombard League that successfully countered the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I, in his attempt to spread his influence over the Italian comunes. Giovanni retired from active service to train new militia and field wardens. Today he resides within the Kingdom of An Tir.

Activities

Giovanni focused his first 10 years in the SCA on the archery community and, after a 10-year sabbatical, he has focused the last 10 years on the thrown weapons community.

When Aquaterra was still a Shire, Giovanni helped organize the Aquaterra Corps of Archers (ACA), which represented the Shire on the archery range and on the battlefield displaying the Shire's colors. The ACA also scheduled archery practices and taught archery-related classes like making bow strings and making self-nocked arrows.

Giovanni originated the five-color theme for the archery ranks that we still use today (green for Tyro and checky-or for Ludacris were added later) based on the five-color archery target. Also of note, the current An Tir Book of Target still uses some assets he created back in the 1990s.

A proponent of learning and using period archery equipment, Giovanni taught classes on hand-shaping self-nocks for arrow shafts and helped develop An Tir's first period division for target archery.

In the pre-heavy-archer era, Giovanni experimented with missile weapons that, until then, were not commonly used by lightly armored missile combatants, including the tennis ball staff sling and an improved design on the throwing "rat" axe, which his opponents, both light and heavy, came to respect.

After successfully passing the Madrone Sergeantry trials, Yeoman Giovanni later became the first lightly armored missile combatant to captain a team in the Barony of Madrone's Warlord tournament, finishing as the runner-up.

Giovanni was chosen by Sir Jon Fitz-Rauf, creator of the Inter Kingdom Archery Championship (IKAC), as his successor to run the Society-wide competition. The responsibilities of running the IKAC and the combat-focused IKCAC included receiving, maintaining, and posting scores; updating the rules, having medallions made and shipped to the winners, and communicating with archers throughout the Society at a time when the Web was still new, and everything had to be done manually.

Today, Giovanni's focus is on the thrown weapons community. He maintains his senior marshal status in target archery and thrown weapons, helps teach marshalling classes, volunteers on the thrown weapons range, and helps work with new throwers.

Giovanni is an admin for the An Tir Thrown Weapons Facebook group and, for almost 10 years, he has been An Tir's thrown weapons scores deputy.

On Target Online

In 1995, Giovanni dell'Arco put together a quarterly archery magazine produced by the archers of An Tir for the archers of An Tir. The goal of On Target was to bring the An Tir archery community together through words and pictures; to unite the archers across the great expanse of our Kingdom through education and entertainment.

On Target's first issue debuted at An Tir's Twelfth Night Coronation, 1996, A.S. XXX, and all 75 copies of the 12-page magazine were sold that first afternoon. A second issue was published before On Target was put on hold for time and financial constraints.

On 4 December 1996, Giovanni dell'Arco put On Target on the Web, hoping to fulfill the magazine's goal more effectively than it could have done in print.

Although Giovanni dell'Arco wrote some of the articles, On Target's foundation was article submissions. The call was put out and An Tir's archers responded by getting involved and by moving us with their poetry, dazzling us with their artwork, asking questions, and educating us with trivia and tips that helped us become better archers in the SCA. They proved that On Target was not just a magazine, it was our magazine.

On Target Online became the official An Tir Royal Archer Web site under several An Tir Royal Archers and the official Keeper of the InterKingdom Archery Competition (IKAC) Web site during Giovanni dell'Arco's tenure (1998-2001) until it was retired.