Many people wonder what was the first airmail transport in history. Here too, our hot air balloons reign supreme! In fact, if we exclude the single dispatch transported aboard the gas balloon that in the distant 1785 under the command of Jean Pierre Blanchard and Jonn Jeffries crossed the English Channel for the first time, we can consider the first massive transport of air communications at the time of the Five Days of Milan, in March 1848. We are in fact in the year of the great revolt that the Milanese made against the Austrian occupiers, commanded by General Radetzky. In fact, it was a matter of communicating outside the besieged city to invite the inhabitants of the surrounding villages to flock to Milan to support the revolt. The leaders of the insurrection Enrico Cernuschi and Carlo Cattaneo, con l’apporto fondamentale dell’illustre abate Antonio Stoppani, they realized the idea of launching small hot air balloons (i.e. hot air balloons) three or four meters high, carrying printed or hand-written dispatches (not stamped, even though the postage stamp had recently been invented in England) in a sort of basket hanging underneath. Since this was a riot, it is clear that it would not have been logical to apply taxation! Several dozen of these balloons were prepared by Stoppani and were launched from many places in the city, largely from the Corsia dei Servi (no longer existing today) and from the courtyard of the Seminario Maggiore, still existing today at the beginning of Corso Venezia, just before Via della Spiga. A plaque commemorates the event on top of the stone door of a nearby building, chipped by a cannon shot by the Austrians, who tried in vain to destroy the launch site. The small hot air balloons achieved their purpose and one even landed in the Cremona area. Of the original flyers and handwritten letters written at the time, some very rare examples remain today, sold at auctions at hyperbolic prices. They belonged to a Milanese collector whose heirs sold them en masse to the well-known Bolaffi company in Turin. As for the original hot air balloons, obviously without a pilot, there was only one example at the Sforza Castle Museum, but it was destroyed in 1943 during the heavy bombings of the Second World War. A black and white photo from the 1930s shows it, with the large writing “Viva Pio IX”, which was a way of invoking, in a Mazzinian way, the revolts against power that were taking place throughout the Peninsula in those years.
