Possess the Air by Taras Grescoe

Author:Taras Grescoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2019-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

17

The Flying Concierge

In joining the fuorusciti, the community of exiles from Mussolini’s Italy, Lauro de Bosis entered a maddening limbo.

In Rome, he had worked side-by-side with the Fascist gerarchi, whom he considered at best second-rate intellects, at worst thugs, their March on Rome a massive bluff enabled by a weak and indecisive king. Through his work alongside Thomas Lamont at the Italy America Society, he knew that the Italian economic miracle was in fact a transitory mirage, one that had been enabled, temporarily, by American loans. And he knew it was only Mussolini’s control of Italian media, and his successful manipulation of foreign reporters, that prevented the world from learning what life was really like under the dictatorship.

Lauro also knew that thousands of Italy’s bravest and brightest citizens had been tortured, jailed, and sent into internal exile, and believed that Il Duce was leading the nation, and the world, towards another war.

As 1931 began, the rest of the world saw a very different Italy. At a time when economies were reeling into depression after the collapse of the American stock market, Fascist Italy appeared confident, progress-oriented, triumphant. The year would see the launch of the luxurious passenger steamer SS Rex, known as “the Riviera afloat,” which would break records by crossing the Atlantic in just four days, at an average speed of 29 knots. Guglielmo Marconi’s ongoing innovations in radio and telegraphy were eclipsing Thomas Edison’s inventions. The six-foot-six boxer Primo Carnera helped erase the image of Italians as diminutive, ill-nourished emigrants every time he flattened another challenger. “The Ambling Alp,” as he was known, would beat out the American Jack Sharkey for the title of world heavyweight champion in 1933. The following year, Italy’s team would win the world soccer championship, and the Fascist playwright Luigi Pirandello would receive the world’s top honour for literature, the Nobel Prize.

Nowhere was Italy’s achievement more impressive than in that most up-to-date of fields, aviation. From the early days of manned flight, the derring-do of fliers had mesmerized the nation. Six weeks after his solo crossing of the English Channel, the French aviator Louis Blériot brought his flying machine to the 1909 Brescia air show. Present in the crowd was Gabriele d’Annunzio, who talked his way into the passenger seat, and gave a press conference in which he read a poem dedicated to Icarus. (Mussolini, still a Socialist, wrote that Blériot’s flight was a “triumph of Latin genius,” and hailed early aviators as the “first champions of a future race of Supermen,” for translating the “dream of Icarus into reality.”) In 1911, the first Italian-made aircraft, built by d’Annunzio’s friend, the engineer Gianni Caproni, was rolled out of a factory in Milan. In the same year, an Italian pilot tossed four grenades from his monoplane on Turkish troops in Libya, becoming the first person in history to drop bombs from a heavier-than-air machine. By 1919, the Italian aviation industry employed a hundred thousand people and was producing 6,500 planes a year.

The Fascists, like the Futurists, were obsessed with flight.

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