Italian fireworks fuse - the Spoletta

Italy is known for being the cradle of European fireworks. There are in Italy some types of fireworks that you can't find in any other place in the World but we will talk about them in another post. Today I will tell you the traditional name for fireworks fuse in Italy: the Spoletta or Spolette.

In most countries, the fireworks time fuse is the Bickford fuse (aka safety fuse or chinese fuse) or a derivative of it. But in Italy, the tradition is to use the so called Spoletta, a fuse that is made of a tube of cardboard (multiple layers of kraft paper) with a blackpowder composition pressed inside, similar to a very small rocket motor. It works exactly as the time fuse, for the same purpose, used both in shells (usually known as "ritardo") and also in the ground to give spacing between mortar firing (known as "ripasso"), for example.

In old times Spolettas where made by hand hammering a certain amount of times, but today and industrialy they are made by mechanical presses in which small brass pistons compress the powder inside the paper tubes. Different sizes give different time delays (as any other kind of fuse).

Here is an example of a Spoletta from Pirotecnia Romano:

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