The republic of the air will banish the evil-doers, parasites, the unwelcome, the whole bad lot of them, and open itself to men of good will. On the threshold the elect will cast off the chrysalis of weight, they will glide and fly.
For us today, accustomed to associating air travel with security checks at airports, long hours of waiting, endemic delays and too narrow seats, all this lyricism seems decidedly out of place. But in the early twentieth century, D’Annunzio only expressed a widely shared sentiment. As far back as 1859, in The Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo dreamed of an airship that would free humanity from its ills:
Man finally takes up his sceptre and casts off his stick.
And we see him fly with Newton’s calculus
Mounted on Pindar’s ode …
This vessel, built from numbers and dreams,
Would amaze Shakespeare and ravish Euler.
Aircraft, a true marriage of science and poetry, would realize the realm of mankind, a fully human age.
Suddenly like an eruption of madness and of joy,
When, after six thousand years on the fatal path,
Brusquely undone by the invisible hand,
Gravity, bound to the foot of the human race,
Breaks away, this chain was every chain!
Everything in man takes flight, and furies, hatreds,
Chimeras, force, finally evaporates, ignorance and error,
misery and hunger,
The divine right of kings, the primitive or Jewish gods.
The invention of the celestial ship was not simply a scientific revolution, it was a spiritual event: ‘It bears man to man and spirit to spirit’, even able to ‘shine faith into the eye of Spinoza’.8
This was the legacy that the poets of the early twentieth century had to contend with. In another literary register, no longer lyrical but resolutely avant-garde, aviation was also the Futurists’ favourite subject. The most modernist aspects of D’Annunzio already draw on a literature that celebrates the fusion of man with machine, aviation here being the most perfect realization of this. In La nuova arma: la macchina, for example, Mario Morasso sees the machine as a true ‘vital force’, an ‘immense multiplication of life’ that possesses a ‘barbarian soul’.9 By fusing with man, it gives birth to ‘a creature half human, half metal tool; a composite monster’. The development of aviation thus has ‘philosophical implications’.10 These themes would be taken up and systematized by the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 – the same year that Blériot crossed the Channel – with the publication of the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti:
1. We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.
2. Courage, boldness, and rebellion will be essential elements in our poetry…
9. We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.
10. We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of self-serving cowardice.
11. We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure, or by rebellion; of the many-hued, many-voiced tides of revolution in our modern capitals; of the pulsating, nightly ardor of arsenals and shipyards, ablaze with their violent electric moons; of railway stations, voraciously devouring smoke-belching serpents; of workshops hanging from the clouds by their twisted threads of smoke; of bridges which, like giant gymnasts, bestride the rivers, flashing in the sunlight like gleaming knives; of intrepid steamships that sniff out the horizon; of broad-breasted locomotives, champing on their wheels like enormous steel horses, bridled with pipes; and of the lissome flight of the airplane, whose propeller flutters like a flag in the wind, seeming to applaud, like a crowd excited.11
It was no accident that this manifesto should end up with a celebration of the aeroplane: aviation constituted a perfect synthesis of all Futurist themes, the contempt for history and attachment to the past, a warlike view of the world, the celebration of technology and speed, ending up with a post-humanist vision of the human body and the machine:
It is necessarily therefore to prepare the imminent and ineluctable identification between man and engine, which will make possible and perfect an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline … We aspire to create a non-human type in whom moral weakness, goodness, emotion and love will be abolished … The non-human and mechanical type, built for an omnipresent speed, will be by nature cruel, omniscient and combative.12
Futurism, the first resolutely avant-garde movement, linked the aesthetic and political fields intimately together13 with the aim of superseding the human, aviation and the figure of the airman being the prototypes of this. Futurism not only launched into ‘aero-poetry’ and ‘aero-painting’, but also into ‘aero-cuisine’, the promotion of a ‘food adapted to a life ever more aerial and rapid’, involving above all ‘the abolition of pasta, the absurd Italian religion’, since ‘it is on account of eating this that [Italians] grow sceptical, ironic and sentimental’.14
The year after the publication of this manifesto saw the appearance of another memorable text on ‘the social influences of aviation’. Achille Loria, professor of economics at the University of Turin and editor of a major intellectual periodical, Echi e commenti, was already one of Italy’s leading intellectuals, and would be appointed a senator in 1919.15 Though almost forgotten today, his name gave rise to Gramsci’s concept of ‘Lorianism’, coined to denote a form of stupidity specific to intellectuals, and of which his article on aviation was the ideal-type:16 ‘this article is entirely a masterpiece of “oddnesses”’ and, ‘given the hilarious character of its content, suited to becoming a “counter-manual” for a school of formal logic and scientific good sense’.17
Like D’Annunzio, Loria was convinced that aviation would revolutionize social life, marking the definitive triumph of economic liberalism. Its first victim, protectionism, would succumb ‘when goods fall on us like meteorites’. In this way, aviation would realize human freedom in the full sense: ‘the tie … that binds the worker to capital will disappear … when the worker, reluctant to enter the factory or banished from it, finds an aeroplane or dirigible that will lift him into the air’. But individual morality would also benefit. The rate of criminality in cities and plains is higher than in mountain villages, which proves the moral benefits of altitude. Loria thus recommends the construction of aerial prisons, and ‘we shall then see, under the magic influence of the rarefied atmosphere, the most baleful murderers transformed into gentle and pious meditators’.18
Given such high stakes as these, it was certainly no longer possible to ‘view aviation as a strange and dangerous game, lacking any practical importance and reserved for acrobats and the mad’, to quote D’Annunzio once more. On the contrary, it set humanity at a crossroads. By