The Award
The CARLO CALDESI AWARD by HOLLAND & HOLLAND is born from the wish of Lodovico, Livia and Vincenzo, children of Carlo Caldesi, to remember their father in the figure of the great shooter, hunter and collectionist that he was.
Since their infancy they spent many days in journeys and hunts in his company, appreciating and tasting, besides his contagious passion, his deep hunting ethics. His adventures and travels belong, by now, to a past time, a legendary time, which appears still farther than what the real elapsing of the years indicates. But the elapsing of time, is also subjective and the remembrances, in particular those personally lived, always remain live and present, like the persons who disappear for ever, only if they are forgotten.
Therefore, the CARLO CALDESI AWARD by HOLLAND & HOLLAND is a concrete way of keeping alive in the hunting world his remembrance and is also an expression of thanks for the fortune of having been able to share so many experiences and emotions, even only though his stories.
Carlo Caldesi
Carlo Caldesi represents in a sober and complete way the best image of a hunter: sporting, generous, very fond, always far from reasons of interest and whishes for visibility.
Born in Milan from a family of Romagna landowners, Carlo Caldesi inherits from his father the passion for hunting and devotes himself successfully to wing shooting, entering the Italian Olympic Team of pidgeon shooting and winning the Monaco Grand Prix.
His passion for big game hunting begins in the fifties and becomes soon the protagonist of his life.
So a sequence of jorneys in all continents begins, in search of more difficult trophies, achieved with the pleasure of toil and of the of the confrontation with nature.
In the range of a very long hunting career, Carlo Caldesi has made over 200 expeditions in 40 different countries, capturing 262 trophies among which three tigers, three times the Big Five, the North American Grand Slam, 14 species of sheep and 11 species of ibex and goats in the world, besides hundreds of chamois, deer and roe-deer in Europe.
He has been the first hunter who conquered the Shoan Bushbuck and the first european to hunt in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Of his trophies 129 are reported in the S.C.I. Record Book and 64 are in the Rowland Ward.
The only Italian to win the prestigious Weatherby Hunting and Conservation Award in 1981 and later the S.C.I. Hall of Fame Award (1983) and the S.C.I. International Hunting Award (1987), Carlo Caldesi was also a leader in conservation and an active member in many hunting and conservation clubs throughout the world.
Member of the C.I.C., he was among the founders of the Italian Chapter of the S.C.I.
He died in 1998, at the end of a last satisfactory hunting season.
