In 1909 a French engineer named Clovis Thouvenot, a concessionaire for the Voisin aeroplane works, took an option on about forty hectares of flat ground outside Cameri and set about building a flying school. It was the right year and very nearly the right place. On the night of 30 to 31 March 1910 a cyclone flattened the newly finished hangars and the opening had to be put back; Alessandro Cagno made the inaugural flight in May.

What happened next put Cameri into the record books. On 28 July 1910 Pasquale Bianchi, a pilot from Lugano, was awarded the first civil pilot’s licence ever issued in Italy, and he earned it on this field. Cameri was the second flying school in the country, after Centocelle outside Rome, which had opened on 15 April 1909.

The airfield’s name comes from the same period. In 1921 it was dedicated to the brothers Natale and Silvio Palli of Casale Monferrato, and the inscription on the bronze plaque was written by Gabriele D’Annunzio: "Questo campo di Cameri pensamento del coraggio abito e dipartenza di giovani aquile…" The centenary of the dedication was marked at Cameri in October 2021 with the brothers’ descendants present.

Giuseppe Gabardini took over from Thouvenot and turned Cameri into something between a factory and an academy. The Gabardini works built aeroplanes on the site, and the Gabardini school trained pilots at a rate that mattered nationally: a monument on the airfield records 1,470 pilots licensed at Cameri between 1913 and 1922, at a time when Italy had almost no other capacity to produce them.

The names that came through include Arturo Ferrarin, who would fly Rome to Tokyo in 1920, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose attachment to the place explains why he wrote the dedication for its plaque. In December 1917 the field also stood up a small local air defence section with two sergeant pilots, which is a reminder of how close the front came to northern Italy after Caporetto.

The school ended for political reasons. In 1930 Italo Balbo, then air minister, closed it because he objected to civil flying schools sharing military airfields. The workshops carried on, and the airfield stayed in use, but the era in which Cameri was where Italians learned to fly was over after twenty years.

The Second World War was harder on the buildings than on the reputation. German forces occupied Cameri after 8 September 1943 and laid two concrete runways — the first real hard surfaces the field had. When the Luftwaffe withdrew on 11 April 1945 it demolished the runways and every building except the command block.

Cameri’s post-war identity was the F-104. The 21° Gruppo converted to the F-104G in 1963 and moved to Cameri on 16 April 1964, operating as an autonomous group until 1 April 1967, when the 53° Stormo was re-formed around it. The wing’s job was all-weather interception over north-western Italy, and its radio call sign was Tigre. It took the F-104S from 1 December 1971 and later the F-104S/ASA.

It was dangerous work in an unforgiving aeroplane, and the base has the memorials to prove it. On the night of 8 February 1968 two F-104Gs collided during a training intercept: the student, clearing away from a target he could no longer see after his radar lost lock, clipped the tank of the aircraft flown by Captain Caranti, a 41-year-old instructor and former display pilot. Both men ejected; Caranti was killed on impact when debris struck his head.

Two of the wing’s losses are remembered with monuments in the towns where they fell. Captain Giovanni Ghislandi of the 21° Gruppo was killed on 30 June 1978, and a cross built from fragments of his F-104 stands at Sondrio. On 18 January 1979 Captain Giovanni Ballestra, 29, was taken ill in the air over Pavia; rather than eject and leave his aircraft to fall on Castelletto di Branduzzo, he stayed with it and steered for open country, and was killed in the crash. The memorial near Branduzzo is built from parts of his engine.

The end came quickly. The 21° Gruppo converted in 1997 to the Tornado ADV, the air-defence variant Italy leased from the Royal Air Force while it waited for the Eurofighter. On 28 July 1999 the 53° Stormo was placed in cadre position and the squadron moved to the 36° Stormo at Gioia del Colle. Cameri kept its airfield command and its maintenance regiment, but no longer had a flying unit of its own.

Italy joined the Joint Strike Fighter programme early and at the second tier, and negotiated an industrial return that no other partner obtained: the right to assemble the aircraft at home. The Final Assembly and Check-Out facility at Cameri is run by Leonardo, on air force land, under Lockheed Martin licence, and it is the only place outside Fort Worth where an F-35 is put together. It covers 101 acres with 22 buildings and more than a million square feet under roof, with eleven assembly stations, five maintenance bays and over 800 people on the programme.

The first aircraft off the line, AL-1, was rolled out on 12 March 2015 and first flew from Cameri on 7 September 2015, a flight of about an hour and a half with a Eurofighter chasing. On 5 February 2016 an Italian Air Force pilot flew AL-1 from Cameri to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, via the Azores, four air refuellings and roughly seven hours on the transatlantic leg, supported by an Italian KC-767, a Eurofighter and two C-130s. It was the first time an F-35 of any kind had crossed the Atlantic, and the pilot had fifty hours on type.

Cameri then did it again with the other variant. The first F-35B assembled outside the United States was rolled out on 5 May 2017, and on 31 January 2018 one flew from Cameri to Patuxent River with a KC-767A, a two-seat Eurofighter and a C-130J in the search-and-rescue role, staging through Lajes. Two Italian test pilots, one from the air force and one from the navy, shared the crossing.

The wider programme figures explain why the plant exists on the scale it does. Cameri is programmed to assemble 60 Italian F-35As and 30 F-35Bs, 29 F-35As for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and 16 of Poland’s 32; the first Polish aircraft, tail number 3517, made its first functional test flight there in July 2026. The plant delivers roughly fifteen aircraft a year.

The less visible half of Cameri’s business is wings. The plant is contracted to produce 835 complete F-35A wing sets for the whole programme, which means that aircraft assembled in Texas for air forces with no Italian connection at all are flying on structures built in Novara. It is an unglamorous industrial fact and probably the most consequential one about the site.

In December 2014 the American Department of Defense selected Cameri as the F-35 heavy airframe maintenance, repair, overhaul and upgrade centre for the European region. The practical effect showed up on 24 March 2025, when airframe 19-5475, an F-35A of the 495th Fighter Squadron from RAF Lakenheath, was inducted for planned depot-level maintenance — the first American F-35 to have depot work done in Europe rather than being flown back to the United States.

Switzerland is the current complication. When Bern signed in 2022, armasuisse said that at least 24 of the 36 Swiss F-35As would be assembled at Cameri, with eight built in the United States for initial pilot training and four more subject to negotiation, deliveries from 2027. On 6 March 2026 the Swiss Federal Council decided to work towards about 30 aircraft instead, after the cost of the programme required roughly 1.1 billion Swiss francs more than the budget allowed, and said the final number would be settled with Washington by the second quarter of 2027.

Work has started regardless. Switzerland confirmed on 14 August 2026 that the first Swiss airframe, MJ-4, had entered structural assembly at Cameri, its fuselage section and wing being built in Novara. How many complete Swiss aircraft Cameri finally assembles is a question that will not be answered until the reduced order is fixed.