Word: orbetello
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...coast of Tuscany, 100 miles northwest of Rome, lies the tiny port of Orbetello. The protecting shoulder of a great mountain (from which Napoleon's Elba can be seen 40 miles out to sea) guards it from high winds. Long sand spits make the mountain look "like a great ship moored by its three ropes of sand"; more important, they make smooth as a millpond the blue lagoons lying on either side of the town. There in winter fat eels are snared for the Christmas tables of Italy. There in summer wealthy Italian families lounge. And there...
...Orbetello hotels were filled last week with females young & old, beauteous & unlovely. They were the women folk of 100 aviators who awaited the signal to start the biggest show ever staged by Italian aviation: the mass flight of 25 seaplanes across the ocean to Chicago and A Century of Progress...
...mental or emotional balance. Under the fanatical hawkeye discipline of their commander, Col. Aldo Pellegrini, they dined together at a severely vegetarian training table. The hours of each day were strictly apportioned to flight practice, study, outdoor sport, sleep. A wife who tried to see her husband at Orbetello was brusquely informed at the gate: "All the pilots of the Atlantic squadron are bachelors." Indignantly she hurried home, exhumed her marriage certificate, stormed the Air Ministry at Rome. But she was not permitted to see her husband until the visitors' days last week...
Meantime at Orbetello, Italy, General Italo Balbo was tuning up 24 Fascist seaplanes to fly over in style. Transshipped to Montreal and reassembled, England's famed London-Edinburgh express, the Royal Scot, complete with new paint, shiny brasses and fresh-scrubbed stewards, exhibited itself to 3,000 an hour in New York before touring leisurely out to Chicago. Mexico City was polishing up a special Presidential train to bear the famed Monte Alban jewels to Chicago's Fair. From Japan to Chicago had come a national exhibit filling 17 freight cars...
...reduced wing span which makes its landing speed more than two miles a minute, a lower safety factor than is permitted in Great Britain. The S. B.-Rolls-Royce ship which won the last Schneider Trophy for Great Britain landed at about 90 m. p. h. At Orbetello, 60 mi. from Rome, 100 aviators are being drilled, trained and watched like crack athletes at the Scuola di Navigazione Aerea (long distance school). The airmen are the pilots, navigators & crews of 24 seaplanes which spade-bearded General Italo Balbo will lead late this month to the Chicago World's Fair...