Italo Balbo, from Italy to Grant Park
With his chestnut- hued goatee, winning smile and world- famous aviation feats, Italo Balbo was seen as a thrilling, swashbuckling figure in his day.
A last- minute compromise ended plans to rename Balbo Drive for Ida B. Wells; she will be honored instead with the renaming of Congress Parkway. But the conversation about stripping Balbo’s name from a prominent if relatively short Chicago street may not be over.
Balbo was a complex figure, according to the man who wrote perhaps the definitive Balbo biography, the late Claudio G. Segre.
“American newspapers likened [ Balbo and his ilk] to gangsters and suggested that Balbo would have found himself quite at home on the streets of Chicago,” Segre wrote in his 1987 book, “Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life.”
But Balbo, a fascist, had no interest in corruption or illegal businesses.
“He and his men were patriots struggling to save Italy” from a feared socialist takeover of the country in the 1920s, Segre wrote. Balbo saw violence as the quickest way to achieve that goal.
Born in Ferrara, Italy, Balbo would go on to become a decorated World War I hero, a political rival to Benito Mussolini and a showman- like aviator who, in 1933, famously led 25 aircraft across the North Atlantic to Chicago and back.
But Balbo, unlike Mussolini, saw no good in Hitler, repeatedly urging the Italian dictator to avoid what he saw as a doomed alliance with the Nazis, Segre wrote.
“I do not differentiate between Catholic Italians and Jewish Italians,” Segre quoted Balbo as saying in 1937.
Balbo, whom Mussolini had appointed governorgeneral of Italian Libya, was shot down in June 1940 in Libya in what historians generally agree was an accident — Italian forces on the ground mistook Balbo’s personal plane for a British one. Everyone on board was killed.
In the aftermath of World War II and fall of fascism, Balbo’s accurate warnings of war were forgotten in the anti- fascist sentiment.
“In Chicago, a major thoroughfare through Grant Park still bore the name of Balbo Drive,” Segre wrote, “but Italy named no street after him— not even in Ferrara. Busts of the once acclaimed aerial conqueror of oceans and continents and portraits of the African colonizer who ruled with imperial Roman grandeur disappeared from public display.”