The Tail of the Lizard

By Annamaria Dall'Anese

As a flight engineer in the Italian Royal Airforce, Vittorio Dall’Anese (1911–1992) participated in the Spanish Civil War, the North African campaign and other key events that marked the 20th century. The vocational history he committed to tape, here presented for the first time, recounts the risk and secrecy, as well as the sense of duty and camaraderie, that characterise warfare. All these themes were a source of inspiration for Annamaria, whose impressionistic texts punctuate her grandfather’s tale. Her imaginative and atmospheric prose, together with previously unpublished photographs and documents from the family archives, offers an inventive juxtaposition to Vittorio’s rich and at times gripping historical account.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Annamaria Dall'Anese
• Release date: Jan 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838220921

Book preview

Dear

List of Illustrations

Front cover photograph: Vittorio with a Savoia-Marchetti SM.81. The aircraft is decorated with a guidon, indicating that it is the one on which the commander flies.

Back cover: A Savoia-Marchetti SM.81, probably Poggio Renatico or Forlì, 1936 or 1937, printed in Ferrara.

Vittorio and the author as a child, Maserada sul Piave, summer 1986

Vittorio looking out of an airplane window at a flying Savoia-Marchetti SM.81

Map of the cities mentioned in the book

Vittorio’s ‘Certificate of Qualification for Pre-aeronautic Specialization Courses,’ issued in Rome on 9th September 1930.

Vittorio (first to the right) with unidentified men. The note at the back of the photographs (in Italian) is: ‘Poggio Renatico, 4th May 1933.’

Vittorio, location and date unknown, printed in Ferrara

Unidentified aviators with a Caproni Ca.73ter (Ca.82), location and date unknown.

Vittorio (right) and two unidentified men with a Savoia-Marchetti S.55, probably Pula or Brindisi, 1935 or 1936.

Vittorio (left) and an unidentified man with a Fiat CR.32., location and date unknown

Vittorio (reclining at the front to the left) with unidentified men, probably Poggio Renatico 1933

Vittorio in a Fiat CR.32., location and date unknown.

Vittorio’s flight diaries showing the flights taking him from Forlì to Palma de Mallorca, as well as his first operations in the Spanish Civil War. All entries except the first two are written in red ink, which indicates that they relate to night flights

Vittorio (standing at the top left) with unidentified men. The note at the back of the photographs (in Italian) is: ‘Poggio Renatico, 14th July 1933.’

Vittorio (sitting at the front with a bandaged finger) with unidentified men, location and date unknown.

Vittorio, location and date unknown.

Vittorio, the note at the back of the photographs (in Italian) is: ‘Mormarica 26th November 1940.’

Vittorio’s ‘Flight Engineer Licence. Ministry of Aviation, Air Traffic Division, Civil Aviation and Air Traffic,’ issued in Rome on 15th July 1943

Vittorio (left) with two unidentified men and two local children, probably North Africa 1940

Vittorio’s flight diaries showing the legs of his perilous journey across the Mediterranean on a Caproni Ca.310.

A Savoia-Marchetti S.55 double-hulled flying boat, location and date unknown

Vittorio (left) with an unidentified man, probably North Africa 1940.

A crashed aircraft, location and date unknown

Bombs with a Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 in the background. A note at the back (in Italian) says: ‘Before leaving for the bombing of Tobruk in Cyrenaica, 20th October 1940(?), Italo Balbo Squadron.’ The date is illegible

Vittorio (left) and unidentified men with the engine of a Dornier Do J Wal, probably Brindisi 1935 or 1936, printed in Brindisi

A crashed aircraft, location and date unknown

Matilde Borsoi, Vittorio’s wife, at the window of their home in Reggio Emilia. The buildings in the background were part of Officine Reggiane, where Vittorio used to work.

Vittorio and Matilde shortly before the flight north. The note written by Matilde at the back (in Italian) says: ‘A happy Sunday in September in Reggio Emilia, 5th September 1943.’

Vittorio (third row, seventh from the right) with an unidentified group in front of a Caproni aircraft.

Vittorio (left) and two unidentified men, location and date unknown.

All aircraft were identified thanks to the help of David Gesalí i Barrera and David Íñiguez I Gràcia.

ITALY

Evening School in Vittorio Veneto (–1930)

My life only really began in Vittorio Veneto when I started going to evening school, which was located behind the town hall, in a classroom of the Arts and Crafts School that I had previously attended for two years. I then had to interrupt my studies because my uncle and father said it was better if I started to earn some money. I went to evening school, but I didn’t attend regularly because I was working as an apprentice in San Giacomo di Veglia. There used to be a garage where the pastry shop now is. In those days, if you were an apprentice you didn’t keep track of the hours you worked: you worked as much as your boss wanted. I missed school, I missed school so many times.

Months afterwards, I was called to sit for my exams. I said: ‘No, I’m not coming because I only attended class a few times.’ But the teacher called for me again. The teacher was from the Teot family; he and his brother ran a garage near the duomo. His brother was in the Air Force, too, but I don’t know what his job was; my teacher had been a mechanic in the Air Force during the First World War. They were called ‘mechanics’ then. He was good. Years ago, I don’t know how many years ago, someone went to pick him up in a car that didn’t work properly. They picked him up and then at the underpass in Cozzuolo the car skidded off the road and crashed. He was killed. Anyway, this teacher had someone call me to my exams again: ‘He said you should come.’ ‘Certainly,’ I said, and I did go to take my exams. I got lucky: I passed.

And then, as a reward, we went to Aviano to see aeroplanes for the first time. I had actually already seen low-flying aeroplanes during the First World War. I was only seven years old, as I was born in 1911.

Bootcamp in Its Infancy

How snobbish to say we are ‘pressed for time’: our twenty-four hours are truly ours, time being the most fairly allocated resource in the world. What changes is how we use it. Today, childhood is the confetti, Santa Clauses and stammering absurdities that grown-ups laugh at to brush off their frustration. Yesterday, it was a bootcamp in its infancy. You bear testimony to this: from acorn to oak, you shoved away tenderness with a sleight of hand. Knee-high, you gaped at the mime of adulthood, shadow theatre, intangible proof of the hardship to come. Your early years were patched up in hindsight, tiny gloves that, brand-new, fell by the wayside, only to be found, still pale pink, by the scion of their original owner.

It took a few decades for babyhood to do a somersault and land back on its feet, reawakened. Overalls were altered into carnival disguises, tools turned into toys. Even AK47s let themselves slide into the dolce vita of snapshots and cocktail parties. With diffused wealth, children are now pensioned off to a period of mollycoddling that is brought to an end only when their stature gives society no excuse not to employ them.

For your younger self, playtime was work time, and work time was humus to your workmanship. Indiscriminate sponge, you confounded the illusionary divide between doing and learning. Page after page, gesture after gesture, scholarship and craftsmanship, the twin sisters of upbringing, came to resemble each other like two drops of sweat.

Whirligigs and Ball Ammo

Maps that for others had boundaries between land and sea, for you, only showed the frontier of the sky. A lad looking up to his master, you let yourself be apprenticed to the place where forlorn minds drift when they are caught off guard by a dream. The clouds were too busy concealing human misery from Heaven to smother the roar that dropped and engulfed your village in fear. You were too young to see this as the harbinger of a precocious present; to you, it was just future imperfect.

Lying in bed after everyone had fallen asleep one night, you designed the routes you would have completed by 1937. God only knows if you imagined the shadow of your wing to shade the eyes of killers or the hands of lovers. From far above, human turmoil is as indistinct as the lines of a silent movie, and the ladder of your life, back then, stopped below the deck where killers and lovers play dice on people’s destinies.

Your own destiny, you had rehearsed it many times backwards, as it should be when existence, not comfort, hangs by a thread. Each drop of oil a pearl of wisdom engraining in you the procedures that would become your worn-out passport to mastery. Pressure, compression, cylinders… and then that roar again, anointing a career that began under a blanket that kept you almost as warm as the wind of the desert.

Early Career in Poggio Renatico (1930–33)

And with this certificate (‘Certificate of Qualification for Pre-aeronautic Specialization Courses’) I went to report in order to be enlisted, and obviously I was assigned to the Air Force. After the recruitment phase, which took place in Parma over 40 days, I was sent to Poggio Renatico, near Ferrara, where they had the Caproni twin-engine biplane night bombers.

During the time of my enlistment in Poggio Renatico the marshal flight engineer was a man from Belluno. He taught me wise things; the basic principles, manual skills. He used to encourage me to speak like people from the mountains, but I couldn’t! I remember he used to say: ‘Dall’Anese, remember, don’t trust the fuel gauge: stick your finger in (for ‘finger’ he used the word from his dialect). When you feel the fuel, it means the tank is full.’ He was a good-natured marshal, he knew the principles better than anyone else. I learnt a lot from him.

Whether you work well also depends on your personality. After refuelling I would always review what I had done, step by step; I checked, I always checked what I had done. There was plenty of time! I would check, starting from the first stage of the process, I would check everything, to see if I had forgotten something. Think of the guy who installed the wheel on Gigi’s¹ Mini in Lovadina: he forgot to tighten a nut and then the wheel came off! These things happen, unfortunately. That is not on. Especially in aviation, mistakes are not acceptable, they are absolutely not acceptable.

Getting It Wrong

Kept at arm’s length, arousal and phlegm assumed you’d never come back, rationality. Your charts would no longer harass disjointed edges or sloppy paragraphs. Your dehydrated red pen would no longer put its hands on my shoulders to straighten my hunchback. But you did come back, squinting Medusa, merciless in your capacity to desert us when we need you and to molest us when albumen and shells are already incensing the floor. In an instant, our breath sublimes away, fleeing the mole burrow of our guts. Mistakes happen when you, unmanacled too late, return to punish us for the faults we committed when you denied us assistance. Your volatile presence chars our backyard, where we laze in self-disgust and commiseration.

‘Wanted’ says the poster pinned to the sycamore that sprays my birthdays with yellows and oranges. Desire and crime amalgamate in this word. Covering up or running away? The more air we squeeze between ourselves and our crimes, the more our conscience becomes thinner. The betrothed are not alone in romanticising the art of the fugue.

After a few months, we began to go on night flights. In the evening, before dinner, we would take the aeroplanes out onto the field. Then we would have dinner and, as darkness fell, the flights began. At first I resisted the temptation, but then I felt