Cameri: a cradle of Italian aviation beside the Ticino

On 28 February 1910 the pioneer Umberto Cagno lifted a fragile Voisin biplane into the sky over Cameri, a farming town near Novara in eastern Piedmont, and began a story that continues to this day. The airfield born from that flight hosted the Gabardini flying school, which by the First World War had become the largest in the world, training some 1,500 pilots.

From biplanes to the F-35

More than a century later, Cameri air base is one of the most important aerospace sites in Europe: alongside the maintenance of Italy's Tornado and Eurofighter jets, it houses the final assembly line where Leonardo and Lockheed Martin build F-35 fighters for Italy and other European countries, the only such facility outside the United States and Japan.

Rice fields and the river park

Away from the runways, Cameri is a town of nearly 11,000 people with much older roots: its name may recall the camp of the Roman general Marius, who defeated the Cimbri nearby. Its lands of rice paddies and woods run down to the river Ticino, within the Piedmont park of the Ticino valley, good for cycling and walking.

Where it is

Cameri sits just seven kilometres north of Novara, some fifty kilometres west of Milan and only twenty-five from Malpensa airport.