Special guest, Princess Elettra Marconi, daughter of the inventor of the wireless radio, Guglielmo Marconi, joined the meeting with the descendants of the ITALIA Airship crew members held in Rome last July 7-8.

When she took the floor to bring up to life some of her father’s memories about the crash and rescue of the Airship, the audience was fully focused on this 90-year old woman with a bright sense of humour. She reminded how, thanks her father’s invention, the crew could bring on board a small radio that was used to send SOS’s and enable rescuers to find the survivors.

“They were saved by the radio of my father, by my father’s invention, that happened only 30 years before,” she said. “I remember he followed the unfolding of events day by day, through the radio, of course, and everybody recognized that they were alive thanks to my father. He was really pleased of it”.

Princess Marconi added that she considers very moving that so many years after this tragic event, the family’s descendants are here in Rome, all together and they are planning to reach Ny Alesund, in the isolated Spitsbergen archipelago, where the ITALIA airship and other polar expeditions of the time started from, to participate in a commemoration in honour of their ancestors.