Proletarians in Rome
Tupolevs in the Roman Sky Di Luigino Caliaro (traduzione di Leonardo Pavese) Recently, I had a chance to scan a few pictures that belong to a collector friend of mine, which, if at first, were not very interesting to me, because they were not pictures of Italian aircraft. But, after looking at them in detail they revealed a link to Italian aviation history that I did not expect. Examining some of the pictures, I realized that in them there appeared some Regia Aeronautica’s officers, while other photos revealed backgrounds that were not, after all, totally unknown to me. Thanks to a 1934 copy of the publication Le Vie dell’Aria , I was able to trace the event pictured in my friend’s photos: It was the August 1934 visit to Rome by three Soviet Tupolev bomber aircraft. It must be said that that was not the first time that such exotic aircraft had visited the Eternal City. O...