Itineraries

This is not a route anyone can drive. Between 1930 and 1933 Italian seaplanes crossed the Atlantic in formation, and what remains of those flights are three sites on two continents. The Idroscalo di Orbetello is the Tuscan lagoon base the squadrons trained at and left from — for Rio in 1930, for Chicago in 1933. On the Chicago lakefront, in Burnham Park, stands an ancient Roman column taken from Ostia and sent by Mussolini’s government in 1934 to commemorate the 1933 flight; it has been contested ever since. In New York, the Palazzo d’Italia opened at Rockefeller Center in 1935 as official Italy’s showcase on Fifth Avenue: Piccirilli’s fascist-flavoured glass panel there was boarded over days after Pearl Harbor and replaced in 1965. Three surviving places, and three different ways a country has handled the same memory.

Two stops, two steel masts, and eleven hundred kilometres of open Arctic between them — which is why this page does not pretend to be a route. Both airships that flew north from Europe used the same corridor. At Vadsø, on the island of Vadsøya, the red mooring mast still stands: the last mainland anchorage, where the Norge moored in May 1926 and the Italia in May 1928. The second mast is at Ny-Ålesund, in Kings Bay on Svalbard, at 79° North. The Norge left from it on 11 May 1926 for the first verified journey to the North Pole; the Italia was based there before the flight of 1928 from which it did not return. Two pieces of engineering left standing where almost nobody passes, marking an attempt that succeeded once and ended in disaster when it was repeated.