After Gillespie Magee I thought it would have made sense to share the story of another barely known flying poet who decided to fight for the freedom of his country from the sky, but in a fairly different way. This is the story of Lauro the Bosis, an Italian writer who, in spite of his wealth and success, still decided to sacrifice everything in a demonstration flight againt the fascist regime
Lauro de Bosis was born in 1901 in Rome into a family deeply oriented toward humanism and literature. He soon became a writer, publishing various kinds of works, including poems, plays and translations, gaining popularity also abroad. In fact, from 1924 he would start travelling to the US for conferences, eventually starting teaching Italian in 1926 at the Harvard University.
In 1928 in Amsterdam he was awarded an Olympic silver medal for his poem Icaro.
However, his opposition to fascism forced him out of a placid and peaceful existence.
In spite of his conservativism, he grew in fact a deep opposition toward the regime oppression, finally founding in July 1930 a secret antifascist society, the “Alleanza Nazionale per la Libertà” (National Alliance for Freedom) which delivered antifascist propaganda letters and leaflets all around Italy. His positions however, too old fashioned and moderate for the rest of the opposing political forces, received scarce interest during the few months of existence of his society.
In October 1930, while he was in the US, the society was discovered and a dozen people related to him, including his mother, were arrested. And at that point he decided to morally rebel against that with a one-way propaganda flight over Rome.
Taking inspiration from D’Annunzio, another Italian poet who, in August 1918 flew above Wien to drop propaganda leaflets against Austria’s participation in WWI, he decided to fly above Rome and drop his writings against the regime.
He took flight lessons in France with little savings while working in a hotel. The first attempt took place in July 1931 with an English biplane, but the aircraft got damaged in an accident.
With little time left and trying to escape the Italian secret service, he finally managed to get another plane, a German Klemm KL25, and finally took off on October 3 of that same year from Marseille.
In spite of the very little flight experience, he still managed to reach Rome, drop 400.000 propaganda leaflets above the crowd and escape the Italian Air Force. However, he never managed to land in Corsica as he had planned and disappeared in the Tyrrhenian Sea.