“L’Armata Azzurra by Righelli for Cines Pittaluga was the ‘first aviation movie ever made in Italy: its shooting took more than one year and one hundred thousand metres of stock, or something like that’. ‘The most daredevil flight raids, squadrons of exceptional pilots, superb races in the sky, but also characters and songs who do not really correspond to its purported aim’.

Let us mention here that the mid-Twenties were all aflutter with wings. The Pittaluga newsreel series edited the short feature film depicting the Raid aereo Inghilterra-Australia (1924 prod. Victor Marcel) and filmed in 1925 the Primo volo transatlantico Italia-Argentina. The company distributed also Spot per l’aeronautica militare, Masso S. Maria onora i suoi caduti, La consegna delle fiamme di battaglia al 13° stormo aereoplani da combattimento, but also L’inaugurazione della linea aerea Torino-Trieste.

In 1927 (the year of the whirling long feature by W. Wellmann, a veteran of the Lafayette Flying Corps, Wings, 139-minutes long), director Silvio Laurenti Rosa with his Da Icaro a De Pinedo made a fully Italian story of aviation composed of different ‘tableaux’ from Daedalus, Minos and Icarus, through Leonardo da Vinci, to Francesco Baracca, D’Annunzio, Noble and De Pinedo.

That same year the first LUCE newsreel (composed of 4 Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions, out of 6 features) showed Lindberg taking off from New York, and De Pinedo flying towards the Azores”.

(Tatti Sanguineti)