Five frames,
five legs

The first Italian woman to fly, and the eighth in the world to earn a licence. In 1913 she flew before the crowd at the Milan Aviation Meeting and let a shower of red carnations fall from the sky. She had held her licence for a year, and permission from no one: she took the sky the way a bird of prey takes it, by staying there.

Thirty-three and a half hours over the Atlantic, alone, with no radio and nothing to see but water: ahead of the cockpit sat the fuel tank, not a windscreen. At Le Bourget a hundred thousand people broke through the fences to reach the aircraft, and Lindbergh, who had taken off unknown, never went back to being an ordinary man.

In 1928 she had crossed the Atlantic as a passenger, and it was not enough. Four years later she crossed it at the controls, with a fuel leak and the exhaust manifold on fire, and put the wheels down in a field near Londonderry. Few people have become legend in a way so adventurous and so mysterious.

He built aircraft and took them to the record himself. On 13 September 1935, in California, the H-1 Racer reached 566 km/h: the first outright speed record, and it stood for four years. Not a pilot who had machines built for him, but a builder who wanted to fly them himself.

Climbing until the air runs out. In 1935 Carina Massone set the world altitude record on a propeller aircraft: the engine loses power, the cold gets in everywhere, and still you climb a little further. A pioneer Italy has almost forgotten, and whom the papers of the day called a heroine of the skies.