Montichiari’s Connection to Cross-Channel Flight Pioneers and Aviation History
Crossing the English Channel to reach Montichiari (and vice versa) is nothing new. Surpassing this stretch of sea to connect the island to the continent was a challenge first overcome by the French pilot Louis Blériot in 1909: that luminous July, this pilot “son of the devil” achieved the feat with a monoplane that cut through the air and terrifed farmers, who ran to have the land blessed touched by the shadow of the “damned machine”. Blériot brought this record, along with the mystery that surrounded it, to the Brescia Air Circuit, held just a couple of months later in the Montichiari moorlands.
The exploits and challenges of the era
The Brescia location thus joined that adventure: The Channel, as international maps call that stretch of sea, was crossed, and in Montichiari everyone sought to meet that daring and proud pilot aboard the same aircraft of the legendary feat: a high-wing Blériot, with a semi-shouldered truss, “with classic tail planes, a rear tricycle landing gear, a cockpit integrated into the fuselage, and a 25 HP engine”.
Perhaps it didn’t sit well with the sons of Albion that a Frenchman had connected Europe to England via air, but the people of Brescia and Montichiari paid little mind and cheered all 14 pilots present that September in Brescia: eight Italians, one American, and five Frenchmen.
Fully absent were the English, confirming how, in fact, English influence in modern means of transport had never enjoyed much success in Brescia until that moment.
Already three decades earlier, in 1879, the English society “The Tramways and General Works Companies Ltd”, concessionaire of the Lodi-Soncino route, unsuccessfully sought the concession for the Brescia-Orzinuovi tram line, just as “The Province of Brescia Steam Tramway Company Ltd” from London was refused permission to manage the new Brescia-Vobarno route.
Unlucky (and shrewdly Italian) strategies prevented even three English investors—railway engineer F.H. Cheeswright, J. Clowes Bayley (manager of Bellingham & Co.), and H. Hagan (from the Freshwater Yarmouth railway company)—from acquiring the concession in 1891 for building the Iseo-Edolo railway line.
Blériot quickly became popular: he had outwitted the English by landing on their soil, arriving in Montichiari with two aircraft, but, as chronicles recount, “chivalrously not competing”: today we would call him a disqualified competitor due to evident superiority, but at the time, his crossing from Les Baraques (Calais) to Dover had made him “the torchbearer of emerging aviation”, and Montichiari greeted him joyfully.
A century later, from Montichiari, we resume crossing the Channel — not scaring “the mad rabbits on the ground” anymore, but with the same aircraft. This time, no longer an elitist transport, but still competing with other airplanes and companies.
A hundred years ago, from Montichiari, a well-known journalist looked far ahead, writing in his notepad: “Our children will adapt to flying as a positive and elementary reality: they will not understand a humanity without wings.”
Marcello Zane