Accustomed to low-cost flights and traveling to the four corners of the globe, we often struggle to remember how new flight is to us human beings. A little over a century ago, talking about civil aviation meant, in practice, betting on the future. The world's first aviation company was the German DELAG, which carried approximately 34,000 passengers in large airships between 1910 and 1914. Connections were limited between Frankfurt and the main German cities.
World War I gave aviation a major boost, with the first passenger planes and European routes emerging. These were small planes carrying mail and occasionally two or three passengers. The French Lignes Aériennes Latecoere began flying at Christmas 1918 on the route from Toulouse to Barcelona, and on February 5, 1919, the German Deutsche Luftreederei debuted on the Berlin-Weimar route. The Dutch KLM, founded in February 1919, is the oldest airline still in existence. And what about Italy? In 1926, SISA was the first airline to operate scheduled flights in Italy.
The route was Turin-Trieste, and the journey was by seaplane, using the seaports of Pavia and Venice as intermediate stops. In 1947, Alitalia's first scheduled flight, Turin-Rome, took place. It lasted about three hours and ushered in an era of great innovation for Italian civil aviation, as the book Storie in volo (Edizioni Minerva, 2026, €19.00, pp. 256) by Filippo Anastasi and Rino Anastasio recounts.
Two protagonists who for decades have observed the world from above and who today bring together memories, testimonies, and documents to recount one of the most fascinating Italian adventures of the twentieth century and the new millennium: that of national air transport. A book written by two voices and four hands: on one side, Filippo Anastasi, journalist, correspondent, Vatican correspondent, and the face and voice of Italy's public radio and television service. On the other, Rino Anastasio, a flight attendant with over thirty-three thousand hours in the air, coordinator of special flights, and a profound expert on the organizational machinery that allows an airplane to transform into a place of institutional and diplomatic representation. The result is an original and engaging book that combines two narrative registers. On the one hand, the grand historical narrative: the book traces the birth of the national airline, the economic boom, the expansion of international connections, the arrival of jets, the oil crises, deregulation, the major transformations of the air transport market, up to the more recent events that marked the end of Alitalia and the birth of ITA Airways. Wars, terrorism, crises
Financial, geopolitical, and technological revolutions are observed through a unique lens: that of those who have watched the world change from airplane windows. Because there is a place where history stops being just a news story and becomes a lived experience. A place suspended in the clouds, where presidents of the Republic, popes, sports champions, heads of state, and ordinary passengers share the same space for a few hours. This place is the airplane.
The heart of the book, however, is probably the "special flights," those that for decades have transported pontiffs, heads of state, and official delegations. The reader climbs aboard the papal plane and discovers how every detail of an apostolic journey is organized, from the layout of the spaces to the security procedures, down to the small details that make each flight unique. Enter the atmosphere of those AZ 4000s that accompanied John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and now Leo XIV on their journeys around the world. Alongside the emotions, there are amusing and surprising episodes, as well as tales involving Sandro Pertini, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Giulio Andreotti, Giovanni Spadolini, and many other figures in Italian public life. Celebrities from the worlds of sports and entertainment are also included. From the Italian national team to international trips, from the World Cup to the Olympics, including legendary figures like Paul Gascoigne, featured in one of the book's most curious episodes. These are stories that reveal the most authentic faces of the protagonists, far from the spotlight and official ceremonies. Stories in Flight, therefore, is not just a book for aviation enthusiasts. It is a tale that spans contemporary Italian and international history, observed from an original and privileged perspective. Because, ultimately, the history of flight is also the story of a country that has always sought to transcend its borders. And these pages remind us that, very often, the most beautiful stories begin precisely when a plane leaves the runway and takes flight.