In her introduction to the conference The Great Voyage of Engineer Albertini to the Arctic Seas, held at the ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ Science and Technology Museum in Milan on 18 March 2025 , Paola Catapano, president of the PolarQuest Association, emphasised the common thread linking the legacy of the legendary expeditions to the North Pole, with particular consideration for those of the airship Italia (1928) and, indeed, Albertini (1929) to the present day.
In 2018, the year of the 90th anniversary of Nobile’s feat with the airship Italia, PolarQuest retraced the route followed by the airship, the first attempt to search for the submerged wreck under the patronage of the Italian Geographical Society, at the same time carrying out unprecedented, precise scientific surveys, an expedition that was then repeated in the summer of 2021.
As is well known, the adventure of the airship Italia failed tragically, crashing 10 men onto the pack and taking another 6 aboard the vessel, which resumed flight and disappeared from sight. Gianni Albertini was the first, and perhaps the last, to go in search of the missing, organising an extremely risky, extremely courageous expedition, but obviously, as he himself writes and as is well known to all those who take part in scientific expeditions, not limited to the ‘human’ aspect: when you go to places like that, you have to do science. “Whatever the goal or the dream, what you really want to look for in our depths, actually you can’t go to those areas without doing science, without doing research because they are areas now as then extremely wild, extremely unexplored, extremely difficult, particularly the polar areas. “
It is true: they are places that hold secrets and unexplored mysteries, and that speak to the soul more than others. I can understand the reasoning well, because last year I too wanted to visit Svalbard (as a simple tourist), places that were so important in the life of my great-uncle Gianni Albertini, who had married Ida, the twin sister of my maternal grandmother Luisa Quintavalle. The emotion I felt when I was told that we were in Albertinibutka, the Albertini Bay, located in the far north of Svalbard, is indescribable; perhaps only my photographs, where I always try to put a lot of my feeling into the fleeting moment of a shot, can convey it at least in part.
Gianni Albertini still speaks today, he speaks of science and he speaks of men, he speaks of snow and ice and rock and the unexplored lands of the Earth and the heart. Getting to know him, thinking about him, studying him is and will be a new path for me.
Bibliography:
G. CAPROTTI, Lecture: Engineer Gianni Albertini’s great voyage to the Arctic Seas, 02/03/2025.
