**Giovanni Bassanesi posing beside his plane in Lodrino.** Memobase, Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini

A flight for freedom

Two Italian anti-fascists scattered leaflets over Milan in the summer of 1930. They had taken off in a small propeller aircraft from Ticino where the pilot returned to make a crash landing shortly afterwards. This audacious escapade placed neutral Switzerland in a political dilemma.

Noëmi Crain Merz

Noëmi Crain Merz is a historian, university lecturer and curator.

On 11 July 1930, a single-engine Farman F.200 took off from a field in Lodrino near Bellinzona. Giovanni Bassanesi, a 25-year-old photographer from Aosta, was at the controls with 26-year-old artist Gioacchino Dolci from Rome in the open cockpit behind him. They were both living in exile in Paris. The weather was overcast; it was the wettest July Switzerland had seen for decades. It took the small propeller aircraft half an hour to reach Milan – the birthplace of the fascist movement eleven years previously.

When they caught sight of the imposing cathedral, Dolci dropped leaflets calling for an uprising against Mussolini’s regime down on the city. Bassanesi, the pilot, had learned to fly specifically in order to complete this mission. He was scared of heights but his desire to see his country free and democratic once again was greater than his fear. He circled the regional capital of Lombardy until all 150,000 leaflets had been dropped among the unsuspecting pedestrians. Then he turned around and flew back towards Switzerland. The intrepid pair had already left Italian airspace by the time the fascist government realised what had happened.

The propeller craft landed on a field in the Magadino plain around 1pm, having taken off from there about two hours earlier. Bassanesi let his passenger alight from the plane before taking to the air again, this time heading north. The fog had become denser, and the wind and rain also hampered visibility. The young anti-fascist aviator who had almost zero flying experience ‒ having gained his licence just under two weeks previously ‒ lost control at the foot of the Gotthard. The aircraft made a crash landing near Airolo. Locals and soldiers, startled by the noise, rushed to the scene and rescued the pilot, who had broken his leg, from the wreckage. Then the police arrived, and Bassanesi’s flight for freedom ended with him in police custody.

**Giovanni Bassanesi emigrated to Paris after the fascists seized power. He worked as a photographer there and studied at the law faculty of the Sorbonne university.** Memobase, Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini

No surrender!

The architects of this airborne spectacular were Alberto Tarchiani and Carlo Rosselli, who had founded the Giustizia e Libertà (justice and freedom) movement with Emilio Lussu in Paris in 1929. Tarchiani was born in 1895 and had been chief editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper until the dictatorship was declared in 1925. He then went into exile in Paris. Rosselli, the younger man by four years, was a professor of economics from Florence who opted to stay in Italy but went underground after 1925 as an opponent of the regime. He started up a magazine called Non mollare! (No surrender!), which was the first publication to be printed and distributed illegally under the fascist dictatorship.

Alberto Tarchiani and Carlo Rosselli headed up the Giustizia e Libertà movement. Memobase, Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini / Memobase, Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini

In 1927, Rosselli was sentenced by an Italian court for assisting prominent anti-fascists to flee abroad. He was banished to the island of Lipari near Sicily, where he began writing the work that would create his political legacy. In opposition to the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and communism, Rosselli argued for a synthesis of socialism and liberalism, which he believed would lead to freedom and equality of opportunity. His essay ‘Socialismo liberale’ was smuggled abroad by his wife and published in Paris.

Alberto Tarchiani devised an escape plan enabling Rosselli and two companions to stage a spectacular breakout from the remote and well-guarded island in 1929. The audacious flight of the three anti-fascists to Paris soon became famous throughout Europe when it was recounted in a book translated into English and French. The prisoners swam out to sea under a new moon, where Gioacchino Dolci (the man who would release the leaflets over Milan from Bassanesi’s aircraft the following year) was waiting in a motorboat.

Attack – the best form of defence

It was mid-November 1930. Bassanesi, Rosselli and Tarchiani sat in the dock before the Federal Criminal Court with a handful of socialists from Ticino who had helped prepare the flight over Milan. Dolci was not there, as his involvement was not known at that time. Lugano civic hall had been turned into a courtroom for the trial and was packed to the rafters. Journalists, foreign observers and curious members of the public filled the benches.

**The Lugano trial attracted considerable interest.** Memobase, Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini

Rosselli and Tarchiani knew they would receive a fair trial in democratic Switzerland and that it would provide them with a platform to make themselves heard. They left the security of exile in Paris and admitted to their role in organising the flight. An article citing Rosselli’s defence speech brought it to the attention of a wider public and caused something of a stir. In it, he reversed roles and acted as a prosecutor against the fascist regime. “I had a house: it was destroyed. I had a newspaper: it was banned. I had a professorship: I had to give it up. I had, and still have, ideas, dignity, an ideal: I had to go to prison to stay true to them. I had teachers, friends – Amendola, Matteotti, Gobetti – they were killed.”

The Federal Council found itself in something of a quandary. Italy started to exert pressure through diplomatic channels, and Bern did not want to jeopardise its good relations with its southern neighbour. But only the judges could pass judgment. Rosselli addressed them and the Swiss public, saying: “The freedom we are fighting for is the freedom you know.” He recounted how Switzerland had taught him ever since childhood to love freedom, take the side of William Tell and despise the tyrant Gessler. “No-one told me that Tell was breaking the rules when he refused to bow to Gessler’s hat, even though he definitely did break them.”

The court sided with the defence. Bassanesi was sentenced to four months in prison – which he had already almost completed on remand. Moreover, his sentence was solely for infringing aviation rules. The accused were cleared of all politically motivated charges.

Group photo of the accused and their lawyers. Giovanni Bassanesi is in the middle, to his right is Carlo Rosselli, to his left is Alberto Tarchiani. Also in the dock were Ticino-based activists Carlo Martignoli, Eugenio Varesi, Costantino Fiscalini and Angelo Cardis, who helped to organise the flight. Memobase, Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini

The Federal Council was much less accommodating to the freedom fighters. It expelled Bassanesi, Rosselli and Tarchiani from the country. There was nothing more tragic, argued Bassanesi, than having to see how European democracies expelled people from their territory as undesirables simply for fighting for the ideals of democracy and freedom. Rosselli and Tarchiani wrote an open letter to Federal Councillor Giuseppe Motta, head of the Federal Political Department, that December, inviting him to reflect on his actions. As they did not live in Switzerland, they believed that their expulsion could only be seen as a purely symbolic police action – and were adamant that all they had done was stand up for the very ideals that Switzerland had made its own for six centuries: “Justice, freedom, autonomy, self-esteem and respect for others.” Knowing that the majority of the judiciary and people stood with them, they wrote, gave them cause for hope. “Ministers come and go. The people remain.”

The rise of fascism

Rosselli and Tarchiani were tireless in their campaign against the passivity of exiled parties and Western democracies. They warned that fascism would inevitably lead to war. They were proved right when Italy attacked Ethiopia (known as Abyssinia at the time), a member of the League of Nations, in 1935, using poisonous gas to subdue the civilian population and conquer the country. The Giustizia e Libertà movement called on democratic nations to take action against this blatant violation of international law, but to no avail. Even the economic sanctions placed on Italy drew no more than half-hearted cooperation from Switzerland. Moreover, Switzerland was the first neutral country to officially recognise Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 at the instigation of Federal Councillor Motta.

Carlo Rosselli was brutally murdered by French right-wing extremists, acting on behalf of Italian fascists, during his holidays in Normandy the following year. His brother Nello, who had been visiting from Florence, was also killed. The Rosselli brothers’ funeral was one of the last major anti-fascist demonstrations. About 150,000 people attended the funeral service in Paris on 19 June 1937.

French newspaper Le Petit Journal reported on the Rosselli brothers’ murder. The Resistenza, the armed uprising against Nazis and fascists from 1943–1945, reunited many of the members of Partito d'Azione (the Action Party), including Alberto Tarchiani, who became Italian Ambassador to the United States after the end of the war. — French newspaper *Le Petit Journal* reported on the Rosselli brothers’ murder. The *Resistenza*, the armed uprising against Nazis and fascists from 1943–1945, reunited many of the members of *Partito d'Azione* (the Action Party), including Alberto Tarchiani, who became Italian Ambassador to the United States after the end of the war. Wikimedia

Bassanesi returned to Italy in 1939, tired of having been expelled from various countries. When the Second World War broke out, he was arrested for distributing leaflets promoting peace and locked up in a psychiatric institution. Gioacchino Dolci emigrated to Argentina in 1939, and Tarchiani fled to the US following the German occupation of France in 1940. Ten years after the flight over Milan, democracy in Europe was all but dead. In 1930, fascist Italy had been the only dictatorship in Western Europe, whereas by 1940, Switzerland was the last bastion of democracy on the European mainland. Otherwise, dictatorships stretched from Portugal all the way to the Soviet Union.

Ticino’s commemoration of the freedom fighters

Bassanesi was to remain incarcerated until the end of the war. He died in1947 at just 42 years of age. Unlike many other anti-fascists who posthumously gained hero status, Bassanesi and his daring flight have been largely forgotten in Italy. His hometown of Aosta waited until 2017 before finally putting up a plaque in his honour. Ticino was quicker off the mark, with the first of several memorials to Bassanesi being erected in 1960. In 1998, a plaque was placed at the crash site and a sculpture was unveiled at Lodrino in 2010 on the initiative of the newly founded Associazione Amici Giovanni Bassanesi. The commune approved another gesture in honour of the intrepid aviator by naming a street after him in 2025, 95 years following his expulsion from the country. The idea behind it, according to mayor Cristiano Triulzi, is to encourage passers-by to think about what makes our society free and democratic.

More of: 20th / 21st century Politics

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