Ms. Camper was 8 years old when she first picked up fencing at a club in her native Trieste, a city on the Adriatic coast in northeastern Italy. The first women's fencing competition was added to the Olympics a decade earlier, at the 1924 Paris Games, but at that time the sport, which descends from duels, remained largely the preserve of men.
As a young girl fascinated by the impulsions and quirks she witnessed at the club, Ms. Camper benefited from the liberalism of her city, once a center of cultural exchange as the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as from the openness of her parents. They allowed her and her sister, like their brother, to practice fencing. Little Irene was practicing wearing a skirt and her hair in pigtails, the best in the family.
Mrs. Camper's parents also encouraged her in her studies. She attended the University of Padua, where in the 1940s she was among the first women in Italy to earn a degree in industrial chemistry, according to Italian media reports. She continued fencing in Padua, where she trained under a revered master, Guido Comini, often competing against men.
“In fencing, ‘my head must command my arm and body to do a certain action, and it must be done faster and better than the opponent,’” said Franco Luxardo, who also trained under Comini and founded the Trofeo Cup, an annual international fencing competition in Padua.
Luxardo, 88, who is also a former president of his family's distillery, once saw Ms. Camper compete when they were young, and recalled her as “very elegant.”
She had her first opportunity to fence in the Olympics at the 1948 London Olympics. The gold medalist in the women's fencing event – the only event in which female fencers were allowed to compete at the time – was Ilona Elek, the Hungarian fencing victor. 1936 Berlin Games. (The 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled due to World War II.)
Elec, one of the best female fencers of her time, defended her title in London. But after four years in Helsinki, Elek, then 45, proved unable to outshine Kemper, then 26.
“The encounter was a desperate one, the match ending in three before Camper scored the decisive blow with a beautifully executed straight charge in preparation,” Charles de Beaumont, the British Olympic fencer, wrote in a report published shortly afterwards on the duel. Al Saif Magazine.
(In interpreting de Beaumont's description of Mrs. Camper's winning move, fencing historian Richard Cohen explained it as “a simple direct lunge while her opponent was preparing to attack her.”)
De Beaumont continued: “Irene Camper was surrounded by enormous courage and far above her previous level.” “She put on an exhilarating display of perseverance mixed with humor and sportsmanship, and it was refreshing to see a fencer who can smile when she is one stroke away from becoming an Olympic champion.”
Ms Camper declined to compete in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the year she married, but returned for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, where she helped lead the Italian women's foil team to the bronze medal. She competed in her last Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, where the Italian women's team finished fourth.
In addition to her Olympic medals, Ms. Camper won the world fencing championship in Brussels in 1953 and the world team championship in Paris in 1957, according to the European Fencing Federation.
As the first Italian woman to win a gold medal in fencing, Ms. Camper was credited with inspiring generations of Italian fencers who followed her, including Olympic gold medalist Valentina Vezzali and Giovanna Trillini, two of the most successful fencers in history. From the Olympic Games.
Ms. Camper attributed her competitive style to her father, a poet and soldier who served in both world wars. “He said that in life, as in fencing, one must be loyal and upright, and never cheat,” she recalls.
Irene Camper was born in Trieste on 12 February 1926. She was 15 when her father died of a heart attack in 1941 while serving in Albania, which was occupied by fascist Italy at the time. Her mother, a homemaker, volunteered with the Red Cross during World War II.
Speaking to Italian newspaper Il Giorno in 2021, Ms Camper sought to deflect attention away from her studies of chemistry at a time when few Italian women were entering the sciences. “Everything was very normal,” she said. “You just have to apply yourself… like in a duel.”
She said she loved her sport largely because competing allowed her to travel around the world while many Italian women did not have such opportunities.
After studying in Padua, Ms. Camper worked for more than a decade at Montecatini, a major Italian chemical company.
Her husband died in 2014 after nearly six decades of marriage. Survivors include three sons, Fabio Corno of Monza, Italy; Giulio Corno from Lissone; Giorgio Corno of Lissone, London; Eight grandchildren. and four grandchildren.
It would be generations after Ms. Camper retired from fencing before women would be fully invited to practice this sport, whose weapons include the sword and sword, in addition to the epee. Women's epee was introduced at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and the epee was also introduced at the 2004 Athens Games.
Until almost the end of her life, Mrs. Camper frequently attended fencing competitions in Italy. Margherita Granbassi, a fellow fencer from Trieste who won two bronze medals in Beijing in 2008, recalls that she once saw Ms. Camper from afar, tracking her movements in the air. It was as if she had a card in her hand, calculating “what I have to do to win,” Granbasi said.
If Ms. Camper has one piece of advice for young fencers, it's this: “I say, be patient and determined, because our sport is a long challenge with the self.”
