Italian Vintage Sailplanes
Author: Vincenzo Pedrielli
Illustrations by: Francesco Camastra
Hard Cover, 272 pages, 90 full page 3-view drawings, hundreds of black and white and many color photographs, Copyright 2011
Dimensions: 8.7 x 11.8 x 0.79 inches (220 x 300 x 20 mm)
Language: Both Italian and English

No Longer Available Here

Overview
The history of Italian gliding from the beginning in 1924 in Asagio up to the recent past. All Italian designs and their patterns are described in detail with many excellent photos shown. Accurate 3-view scale drawings and an appendix with profiles and cross sections give the fuselage scale model builder all the necessary information.

From the Back Cover
This volume of 272 pages, is the result of meticulous research lasting a few years, carried out by Vincenzo Pedrielli.  It includes notes rich in historical information and drawings from the beginning of gliding in Italy and its growth in the past century. 

The book covers the development of Italian gliding from its birth on, through designers and builders, fuselages and sections, up to the technical description of each individual sailplane, skillfully drawn in the same scale by friend Francesco Camastra and supported by a wide array of photographic documentation.

A silent flight through two wars, by young minds, full of passion and fantasy, who established the glory of Italian Gliding.

Preface by Martin Simons

This beautiful book is an important contribution to the history of soaring in Italy. It fills a gap in the literature of this subject, drawing favorable attention to the work of Italian sailplane designers, constructors and pilots. 

In the English speaking world little has been known of them hitherto. Here is the climax of years of careful study and research by Vincenzo Pedrielli, the author.

It will become recognized as essential for anyone who is fascinated by the story of the Italian gliding movement as it paralleled the extraordinary worldwide growth of this sport.

It is clear now that designers such as Luigi Teichfuss, whose aircraft for the first time are fully described here, and other engineers such as those of the Aeronautica Lombarda and the students of the Milan Polytechnic, made important contributions before 1939.

The Morelli brothers at the Gliding Centre of the Polytechnic of Torino, founded in 1952, and Edgardo Ciani with his extraordinary Spillo of 1954 and later designs, were fully up to date or even ahead of their contemporaries in other European countries, Japan and the Americas. Italian sailplane designers are now getting the recognition they fully deserve.  It is impossible now to see these splendid, and sometimes not quite so splendid, aircraft flying, nor can pilots hope to climb into their cockpits and take off. They can, however, be flown in smaller form. Francesco Camastra’s accurate drawings and the photographs included will be an invaluable resource for model makers who until now have had very little access to detailed information of this kind.

Vincenzo and Francesco, thank you!

Martin Simon

Introduction to "Fuselages and Sections" section of the book

A model builder’s target is to build a replica that is as exact an image of the original as possible, right down to the smallest detail, except for the size.

These drawings, showing the fuselage cross sections of gliders designed up to 1940, might be useful for building a good scale model. I remind the reader that the drawings marked with the letter “A”, come from original plans, while the others have been carried out from approximate 3-View-drawings or even from just photographs. The dimensions are expressed in centimeters and extracted from original documents while the dimensions in brackets must be considered estimated.

I hope that this drawing collection is a good starting point for a scale project of an Italian vintage sailplane. Vincenzo and myself are more than pleased to share any further detailed information in our possession.

Francesco Camastra