AEROPLANE TO AEROPLANO

      By Roberto Gentilli (Translated and edited by L. Pavese) To leave an established company like FIAT, in 1932, during a great depression that was impoverishing Europe, was not really a good idea; to leave the company to become an aircraft designer was surely madness. But Alberto Jona did exactly that, and the result were a  few very interesting aircraft. Jona was born in 1904, graduated in engineering from the Politecnico of Turin and in 1928 joined the Ufficio Tecnico Motori di Aviazione FIAT (the technical department of FIAT Aviation Engines division), where he worked at the fine tuning of the A.S.3 engines for the Schneider Cup race. In 1929 he went to Calshot, in Hampshire County, U.K., where he followed the unsuccessful try-outs of the M.67 and C.29 seaplane-racers, and subsequently he worked at the preparation of the A.S.6 engine for Francesco Agello's record flight. He later transferred...

     For the readers who don’t know, during the Fascist era, Italian boys ages six to eight were enlisted in an organization called the “Children of the She-Wolf,” from Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, who according to the myth were suckled by a she-wolf.  Italian artist Hugo Pratt, the creator of Corto Maltese, was one of them, and followed his father to Africa, as a very young member of the colonial police.  The link between the Italian Right and the ink heroes like Corto Maltese and Tex Willer (the most widely read comics in the world), created by Italian artists, is explored very well by a book by Roberto Alfatti Appetiti , All’armi siam fumetti (To arms! We’re comics!), edited by Italian writer Miro Renzaglia and published by I Libri de "Il Fondo." T he book is a collection of articles and interviews published  by Alfatti Appetiti between 2006 and 2010. As far as I know, this aspect of the Italian graphic novels production...