LUCIANO MARTINI SCRITTORE

Luciano Martini was an intelligent and accurate many-sided person who could have played, in his lifetime, many different professional roles and in fact left on this world clear footsteps of his versatility. In this short paper I am referring just to his literary activity. His main literary piece of work is an essay book dedicated to the figure of Geo Chavez, a young man who became interested to the first aircrafts that in fact had an extraordinary time of interest in France, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Chavez was due to be the first to succeed to cross the Alps by the aerial mean, although he unfortunately precipitated and lost his life at his arrival in Domodossola, on September 1910. I believe that the choice of Martini to tell this heroic and tragic story was due to a deep personal evaluation and to a strong affinity of civil and ethical values. Among the various subjects treated in this book, I wish to point out the cause of the fatal fall that took the life of the young Chavez. This cause was never fully understood since 1910, that is through a entire century but it is accurately discussed by Martini by means of a rational and passional approach worthy of a master who defends the memory of a young pupil lost while being in service. Martini resolutely refuses to believe that the fall of the aircraft might have been due to a human mistake in the maneuver of landing. He believes that the young Chavez was a pilot experienced enough to avoid such an elementary mistake. He is sure and does demonstrate that much more realistic is the hypothesis of a structural collapse of the aircraft itself. Therefore, Chavez fall was comparable to that of Icarus that accomplished his promised flight but finally precipitated due to the wax fusion of his wings. The fact that his fall happened just in the lowest ten meters of altitude was neither a reason of consolation nor of salvation.