On March 4 1921, the Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo – also known as “Capronissimo” and Noviplano Transaereo – tried to take off from Lake Maggiore with its nine, 30-meter-long wings.

Man’s dream of winning against gravity, symbolized by Icarus and Leonardo, had already come true with hot air balloons, airships, and biplanes.

Engineer Gianni Caproni, however, wanted to push that dream a little further: with eight American 400-hp engines, 750 square meters of wings and 23 of fuselage, his gigantic hydroplane was over nine meters tall and weighed over 15,000 kilos when empty. It was designed to carry one hundred people across the Atlantic.

Caproni had been thinking about this project since 1913, but started seriously working on it only after the First World War. It took a long time, also because Caproni was faced with a scatter of huge obstacles – and had to prove just how headstrong he was.

Nevertheless, on March 4 1921 he gave up. The huge machine, with former military aviator Federico Semprini in the cabin, climbed too much in an effort to pull away from the flat waters of the lake and broke a few components, shattering Caproni’s dreams.

Today, parts of the Transaereo – one of the engines, the control panel, some of the floats – are showcased in Trento’s Gianni Caproni Museum of Aeronautics.

And, like these images, they are a glimpse of a great dream.