Bombarding the Boss: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air (2020)

“There was no mistaking it: an airplane had made an incursion in Italy’s apparently inviolable airspace, and was now rapidly losing altitude. To those on the Janiculum that evening, the little plane seemed to be headed for the city’s historical centre on the other side of the Tiber.

Inside the Palazzo Chigi, preparations were being made for that night’s meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism, where Mussolini planned to discuss strategy with foreign affairs minister Dino Grandi, justice minister Alfredo Rocco, and other leading party ras until the early hours of the morning.

The little plane was plunging, like a dagger from above, directed straight at the heart of Fascist power. . . .

Though Lauro’s heart was racing, his spirits were high, for the flight had gone according to plan. Before taking off, he had sketched out his route in pencil on the back of the draft of a National Alliance leaflet. From the take-off at Marignane to the base of Corsica’s northern peninsula—that finger of French territory raised up towards the crook of the Italian Riviera—would take two hours and ten minutes. Another thirty-three minutes to reach Pianosa, one of the penal islands to which enemies of the regime were banished. More island-hopping, flying by sight from Montecristo to Giglio: three quarters of an hour. Then, after ten more minutes over the Tyrrhenian Sea, he would climb to four thousand metres as he approached the Italian mainland to avoid being sighted. Following the coast southwards, Pegasus would overfly the ancient Roman port of Civitavecchia, then turn inland at Palidoro, and begin its downwards glide twenty kilometres outside of Rome, when the dome of St. Peter’s was in sight.

He had estimated a total flight time of 303 minutes, but a tailwind pushed the Messerschmitt beyond its maximum speed of 135 kilometres an hour. The German pilots had clocked his take-off at 3:15 in the afternoon; now, at eight o’clock, eighteen minutes ahead of schedule, he was bearing down on the unmistakable bend in the Tiber River that marked the heart of Rome. In theory, he had fuel for four and a half more hours of flight—not enough to reach Nice, but surely enough to reach the east coast of Corsica, where the magnesium flares on his wingtips could help him find a landing field.

The city he now saw below him was no longer the endearing backwater he had grown up in. Approaching the Janiculum, he saw how Rome had spread beyond the old Aurelian Walls, modern apartment blocks and worksites bleeding into the old pasture land beyond the city gates. A broad boulevard thrust through the Ghetto towards the left bank of the Tiber, and a new road had been driven from the Piazza Venezia to the Coliseum, cleaving the Forum. Taxis and the black sedans of government officials—there were now thirty thousand automobiles on the streets of Rome—jostled for space in the piazze where once only the hoofs of cabmen’s horses had clattered on the cobblestones.

It was a comfort, as he came in low over the Tiber north of the Ponte Cavour, to see that the streets of the historic centre, near his family’s apartment, seemed untouched by Mussolini’s hand. The vegetation-covered mound that was Augustus’s mausoleum was directly below him, the Pantheon’s oculus-pierced dome on his right. Drawing a bead on the triangle of the Piazza di Spagna, he opened the throttle, and the plane’s engine roared as the whirring propeller drew him upwards towards the church of Trinità dei Monti. From below, it must have looked like Pegasus was galloping up the Spanish Steps. At the last second, he pulled the lever to release a load of leaflets from the underbelly. Circling the piazza where he’d asked his friend Giorgio de Santillana to loan him the money to buy the machine to print the first National Alliance chain letters, he saw he’d scored a direct hit. The leaflets dropped in clumps, and then, separating in the light breeze, fluttered earthwards. Some were plucked out of the air by leaping children. Others papered the tiles of roof of the house where Keats had died, or drooped over the wales of Bernini’s boat-shaped fountain.

Picking out the rooftop terrace of the family’s palazzo, he loosed another load. In a letter to his mother, he had imagined her being informed of his triumphant return to Rome by a snowfall of leaflets, and pictured her joy should he alight on their rooftop terrazzo beneath a silk parachute. She might be there even now, as it was her custom to have an evening coffee while enjoying the sunset. Circling back towards the Villa Borghese park, where he’d first courted Ruth Draper, he papered the winding paths and ornamental temples with his little tracts. Next came the Quirinal Palace, the royal residence. He bombarded its gardens with leaflets addressed to the king, imploring him, in the name of the forty million Italians who looked to him for guidance, to choose liberty over oppression.

Over the Palazzo Chigi, where the ‘Boss’ was sure to be working, he came in low. Another direct hit. For good measure he hurled copies of a book from the cockpit: Fascism in Italy, a blistering dissection of the weaknesses of the regime by a British author, which he’d had translated and printed in a lightweight edition. The street lamps turned the paper that drifted past Il Duce’s balcony into glowing rectangles, like sheets torn from a medieval gilder’s book.

For thirty minutes, perhaps forty, Lauro circled, dove, and loosed payloads of his little bombshells. They fell on the terraces of cafés in Trastevere, on a crowd gathered at an outdoor cinema, on the luxurious hotels in the Piazza Barberini, on the curving arms of Bernini’s colonnades that embraced St. Peter’s Square. No searchlights pivoted to follow his progress. No airplanes of Balbo’s Aeronautica dropped from above to bring him down. As Icarus had dared to defy the tyrant Minos, Lauro had outfoxed and shamed the dictator Mussolini. . . .

The spectacle of the lone plane, flying free, low, and unpursued over the ‘inviolable’ sky of Rome astonished all who witnessed it. Police and militia rushed to gather up the leaflets, ordering those who had stooped to retrieve them to surrender their prizes. Outside the luxurious Hotel Bristol, guards shouted and trained flashlights on the facade, convinced agitators were dropping manifestos from an upper-floor balcony.

Many who plucked the papers from the air, or grabbed them from the cobblestones, glanced quickly at the words—lies, boycott, resist, accept nothing—and tucked them in coat pockets or purses. In their homes, they marvelled at what was written, in language clear and direct, on those papers. Words that, in a nation where every publication was subject to state censorship, had been unsayable for years.

On one of the four leaflets, they read that Mussolini was a ‘Hapsburg in a black shirt’ who treated the liberty for which so many had given their lives in the First World War as a ‘putrefied corpse.’ His regime was ‘not only the most tyrannical and corrupt but also the most bankrupt of all governments.’ The world, they were told, ‘looks with horror at a regime’ which ‘exalts the brutality of its henchmen’ in order ‘to reduce you to slavery.’ They were informed that the National Alliance had ‘launched its program of a union of all forces against Fascism.’ The severity of the sentences against its leaders was proof ‘how much its program frightens the regime.’

Another leaflet set forth an action plan for non-violent resistance to Mussolini. . . . ‘Whoever you are, you are sure to be a severe critic of Fascism, and you must feel the servile shame. But even you are responsible for your inaction. Do not seek to justify yourself with the illusion that there is nothing to be done. That is not true. Every person of courage and honour is quietly working for a free Italy. Even if you do not want to join us, there are still TEN THINGS which you can do. You can, and therefore you must:

1. Do not attend any Fascist celebration.
2. Never buy a Fascist newspaper. They are all lies.
3. 3. Do not smoke. (The tobacco monopoly provides Fascism with three billion lire a year . . . .)
4. Do no action and speak no word in praise of the regime.
5. Boycott all the servants of the regime in your personal and business relations. They are your exploiters.
6. Boycott or hamper every Fascist initiative by a policy of obstructionism. Even the best initiatives only serve to add another chain to your burden . . . .
7. Accept nothing of Fascism. Whatever it offers you is the price of your slavery.
8. Circulate the leaflets of the National Alliance. Spread every piece of truthful news you may get hold of. The truth is always anti-Fascist.
9. Make a chain of trusted friends on whom you may rely whatever happens.
10. Believe in Italy and in Freedom. The defeatism of the Italian people is the real foundation of the Fascist regime. Tell others of your belief and fervor. We are in the fullness of the Risorgimento. The new oppressors are fiercer and more corrupt than the old, but they will also fail. They are only united by a conspiracy, and we are bound by the will to be free. The Spanish people have freed their country. Do not despair of yours.’

When Mussolini learned of the appearance of an unidentified plane over the Palazzo Chigi, he was enraged. First Bassanesi had mocked the regime by bombarding Milan with propaganda. Now an unknown pilot had penetrated the sacred skies of Rome, and dared to dive-bomb his own palace. Had the books and manifestos been explosives, he and the leading members of Fascism’s Grand Council could well have been blown to bits.”—Taras Grescoe, Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome (2020)