Punta Ala in Tuscany, a 1933 flight to Chicago, Tobruk, Orkney Islands

◄  With a group of friends we rented Castello Punta Ala in Tuscany, perched on a hilltop overlooking the marina of Punta Ala and looking west to the island of Elba (briefly Napoleon’s prison island) and south-west to Montecristo Island. Corsica is further west. The castle was built as Torre di Troia Nuova in 1562-1563. It underwent assorted reconstructions and acquired other names before it was turned into a residence by Italo Balbo in 1932. Today it’s a confusing tangle of stairways, passages and even a tunnel under the road to a separate building with a billiard table and multiple chandeliers. Click here if you’d like to stay there.

◄  Italian Air Armada poster

Italo Balbo was Mussolini’s Minister of Aviation and is renowned for his long distance flying feats, in particular leading a formation of 24 Savoia-Marchetti S.55X twin-hulled flying boats across the Atlantic to Chicago for the World’s Fair known as the Century of Progress International Exposition. Taking off from Orbetello, 60km south of Punta Ala, the fleet flew 9700km across the Atlantic to Chicago:

Orbetello to Amsterdam 1400 km
Amsterdam to Londonderry (now Northern Ireland) 1000km
Londonderry to Reykjavik, Iceland 1500km
Reykjavik to Cartwright, Labrador, Canada 2400km
Cartwright to Shediac, New Brunswick, Canada 1200km
Shediac to Montreal, Quebec, Canada 800km
Montreal to Chicago, USA 1400km

On the long leg from Reykjavik to Cartwright they were prepared if necessary to divert to Julianehåb in the south of Greenland. Today that’s Qaqortoq and I visited there on my recent Greenland trip and then flew with Icelandair from Qaqortoq to Reykjavik.

◄ The 24 flying boats, usually they flew in groups of three

The arrival of Balbo’s 24 aircraft in Chicago was a major event, 60,000 spectators turned out to watch his ‘Italian Air Armada’ touch down on Lake Michigan.

7th Street was renamed Balbo Drive and if you follow the shore of Lake Michigan from the end of Balbo Drive you’ll come to the Balbo Monument in Burnham Park. The monument is a 2000-year-old Roman column brought from Ostia Antica, the ancient port of Rome. The inscription on the monument pedestal notes that it was a gift from ‘Fascist Italy’ so hardly surprisingly Balbo Drive and the Balbo Monument have attracted some controversy.

▲ If you want to see a Savoia-Marchetti flying boat the only one remaining is in Brazil, it was flown there in 1927. For some time it was displayed in the TAM Aviation Museum in São Carlos, 250km from São Paulo, then the museum was closed, then reopened and perhaps it’s in Itu in São Paulo now! Since 1923 a full scale reproduction of the historic aircraft has been on display at the Volandia Museum in Milan, Italy.

Italo Balbo came to an unfortunate end in 1940 during WW II. He was flying to the Italian base in Tobruk and his aircraft was mistaken as an attacking British aircraft and shot down by Italian anti-aircraft fire. If he’d survived that friendly fire incident he might have been captured by the British and, like other Italian prisoners-of-war from Tobruk, shipped off to the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. When I visited the islands in April 2026 the Italian Chapel, the only surviving reminder of the prison camp, was a real highlight for me.