I wonder how many people know why there’s a small jet plane on the ‘rotonda’ of the gyratory system accessing the autostrada from Lucca’s Viale Europa? The aircraft, a Piaggio-Douglas PD-808 multi-purpose jet was donated to Lucca by the Italian air force.

If one manages to reach the central island displaying the PD-808 without getting run over by the busy traffic there’s a plaque which states “To the pilot Carlo del Prete and the aviators from Lucca”.

Who was Del Prete? Born in Lucca in 1897, he became a cadet at Livorno’s naval accademy and joined Italy’s Royal Navy serving on submarines during World War One. He took part in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s daring incursion against the Austrian navy at Buccari where his submarine escorted the poet’s legendary MAS 62 torpedo boat preserved at the ‘Vittoriale’ by lake Garda.

After the war Del Prete got interested in aviation and qualified as a pilot in 1922. Transferring to the newly created Italian Royal Air force he became a navigator. In this role Del Prete organised and took part in various pioneering long-distance flights. The most important among these was the 1927 ‘Four Continents’ flight from Italy to Africa, across the Atlantic to Brazil and other South American countries, the Caribbean, the United States and back to Rome.

In 1928 Del Prete and his colleague Arturo Ferrarin undertook fifty one laps on a Savoia-Marchetti S64 between Ladispoli and Anzio breaking three world records. In the same year they flew the South Atlantic to Brazil where they were fêted in Rio de Janeiro and where there is a monument commemorating the flight. Unfortunately Del Prete crashed on a demonstration flight in the same year and was badly injured. Despite having a leg amputated to avoid infection the pioneering aviator died a few days later; he was posthumously awarded Italy’s highest honour for those serving its air force, the Gold Medal to Aeronautic Valour.

Lucca has not only remembered Carlo Del Prete with the Piaggio-Douglas jet but also by naming a street after him. It’s the one which runs externally along the walls from Porta San Donato to Porta Santa Maria. Furthermore, if any of you are curious about a giant eagle in Piazza San Pietro Somaldi it nests on the house where Del Prete lived.

Bagni di Lucca has its aviation hero too. In 2017 I attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque to Mario Calderara, Italy’s first licensed pilot, on the façade of the Villa Gamba.

A private invitation from Pietro, the highly personable descendant of the Gamba-Calderara family, enabled us to visit the gardens and the piano nobile of the villa, otherwise strictly closed to the general public. Pietro showed us some valuable blueprints of his ancestor’s airplane designs.

The full name of the villa is Gamba-Calderara and Mario Calderara (1879-1944), one of Italy’s greatest pioneer aviators, lived there. Calderara was the first Italian to get a pilot’s license in 1909 and was the builder of Italy’s first flying boat in 1911.

Mario, like his fellow Lucchese Carlo del Prete, joined Livorno’s naval academy where he graduated as midshipman in 1901. He became fascinated by the problems of flight and avidly studied the Wright brothers’ pioneering efforts. In 1907 Calderara reached a height of over 50 feet on his biplane towed by a ship. In 1909 he piloted his first unassisted heavier-than-air fight at Buc in France.

The big breakthrough occurred when Calderara invited Wilbur Wright to Rome. Wright gave Calderara some flying lessons and, consequently, Calderara’s flights increased in length.

In 1911 Calderara built a flying boat, the largest in the world and managed to fly three passengers on it in 1912. In 1917 he became one of the founders of the RAF’s Italian equivalent.

(Mario Calderara is another feather in the cap of those greats who have established Bagni di Lucca as a centre of excellence. For example, our town was the first in Italy to have electric street lighting, the first one to found a Scout troop, the first to pioneer hydro-therapy, the birthplace of Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ (as well as the place where most of the maestro’s ‘Girl of the Golden West’ was composed. It’s great that Bagni di Lucca is now also remembered as the home of one of Italy’s greatest aviation pioneers and co-founder of its air force).

Carlo del Prete and Mario Calderara make us reflect on the miracle of heavier-than-air flight and how we have become used to, indeed dependent on it, at no time more than the present when so many of us are stranded in some non-Italian part of the globe still waiting for that elusive flight to appear and return us to the ‘Bel Paese’!