This is the single most asked question about Grosseto, and the honest answer is more interesting than the legend. Francesco Baracca, Italy’s leading ace of the First World War with 34 victories, began painting a prancing horse on his aircraft between late 1916 and early 1917. In a letter to his mother dated 27 April 1918 he said he had taken it from the Piemonte Reale Cavalleria, the regiment he had joined in 1909. The Museo Francesco Baracca at Lugo holds a painted panel from his aircraft and states the horse was black throughout his lifetime; the wing’s own veterans’ association repeats an older tradition that it was red and turned black in mourning. The museum’s panel is the harder evidence.

Baracca was killed on 19 June 1918 strafing Austro-Hungarian trenches on the Montello; his body was found four days later, four metres from his burnt SPAD. In 1923 Enzo Ferrari won the Circuito del Savio near Ravenna and, by his own account, was introduced afterwards to Baracca’s father, Count Enrico. The Countess Paolina later told him, in the words Ferrari set down in his 1962 memoir, "Ferrari, metta sulle sue macchine il cavallino rampante del mio figliolo, Le porterà fortuna" — put my son’s prancing horse on your cars, it will bring you luck.

Here is where the romance should be handled carefully. Ferrari’s memoir, published almost forty years after the event, is the only source for that conversation. No contemporary letter, deed or family document confirming the gift is known. Ferrari did not found the Scuderia until 1929 and the horse did not appear on a car until the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps on 9 July 1932 — nine years after the meeting he described. Why the Baracca family agreed, and whether the exchange happened in those words, is not documented.

The two horses are also not the same horse. Baracca’s was black, on a white cloud on his SPAD, with the tail down. Ferrari’s stands on a canary-yellow shield — the colour of Modena — with the tail raised, a pose a horse rearing on its hind legs cannot actually adopt, and most likely taken from Gino Croari’s 1930 painting of the Baracca family crest rather than from an aeroplane. Ferrari said as much himself: the horse was and would always be black, and the yellow was his addition.

The air force’s claim is the older one and it is unbroken. The 4° Stormo, formed at Campoformido on 1 June 1931 around the 9° and 10° Gruppi — both constituted on 10 April 1917, the 10° containing Baracca’s own 91ª Squadriglia — adopted the horse in 1933. The two groups wear it differently to this day: the 10° a black horse on white, the 9° a white horse on black. The ones at Grosseto are the 9°.

The 4° Stormo Caccia was constituted at Campoformido, near Udine, on 1 June 1931, built on the 9° and 10° Gruppi and through them on the most decorated fighter squadrons of the First World War, including the 91ª — the squadriglia degli assi. It became the Regia Aeronautica’s showpiece fighter unit: Fiat CR.42s from late 1939, Macchi C.200 Saettas at the outbreak of war, C.202 Folgores from 1941, and pilots whose names still carry in Italy — Franco Lucchini, Leonardo Ferrulli, Furio Niclot Doglio.

The wing fought over Yugoslavia, North Africa and El Alamein and then over Sicily, and after the armistice flew Macchi C.205s and American P-39 Airacobras for the co-belligerent air force — a hard sequence to read without flinching. P-38 Lightnings came in 1946, the wing moved to Naples-Capodichino in 1947 and took P-51D Mustangs, and the jet age arrived with the de Havilland Vampire, on which the 4ª Aerobrigata formed the Cavallino Rampante team, one of the ancestors of the Frecce Tricolori.

In 1959 the wing settled permanently at Grosseto, and the 9° Gruppo Caccia joined it there on 1 June 1961. A note on the dates: most sources, including the airfield’s own entries and the Italian Air Force centennial material of 2017, give 1959 for the move; at least one enthusiast history gives November 1962, and we have followed 1959.

Grosseto has been an air defence base ever since, and the line is unusually clean for an Italian wing: the same groups, the same badge, the same job, in the same place, for more than sixty years. Its deployments read like a list of NATO’s air-policing commitments: Iceland in 2013 and 2017–19, Lithuania in 2015 and 2020–21, Bulgaria in 2017, Estonia in 2018 and 2021, Romania in 2019 and 2021–22, and Kuwait for Operation Inherent Resolve.

Grosseto airfield was a legitimate military target and the Twelfth Air Force treated it as one. On 26 April 1943, Easter Monday, forty-eight B-17 Flying Fortresses flew from airfields in Algeria to attack it. At around two in the afternoon, nineteen of the forty-eight dropped roughly 2,000 cluster bombs on the city of Grosseto rather than on the airfield.

At least 134 inhabitants were killed. Most of them were children between five and fourteen, who were at a funfair in the Porta Vecchia district on a public holiday. The count is a floor rather than a ceiling; Italian local historiography gives higher figures for the total civilian dead across the whole bombing of Grosseto, and no single authoritative number exists.

The raids did not stop there. Heavy attacks by the USAAF and the RAF continued from May 1943 to June 1944; the airfield itself was destroyed in a raid on 20 May, in which a reported 1,600 German soldiers were killed, and the railway station was destroyed on 9 September. Reconstruction of the airfield began in 1944 and it sat largely unused until the 1950s.

The town commemorates 26 April every year. It is one reason the city’s relationship with its air base is not simple civic pride: the airfield is why the bombers came.

The 9° Gruppo received its first F-104G Starfighters in April 1963, and the wing moved to the Italian-developed F-104S from the summer of 1970 — more thrust, Sparrow missiles, and the interceptor that defined Italian air defence for three decades. Italy flew the Starfighter longer than anyone, and paid for it: the type’s Italian accident record is one of the uncomfortable facts of post-war Italian aviation, and Grosseto lost pilots to it like every other F-104 base.

One of them was Lieutenant Ettore Di Blasio, 27, from Montesilvano. On 5 May 1993 the afterburner on his F-104 shut down on take-off; he tried and failed to take the arrester barrier, and when he ejected his parachute did not open. The wing held a memorial ceremony for him at Grosseto on the thirtieth anniversary in 2023. An instructor who was there that day, Colonel Giorgio Riolo, said afterwards that from that day working on the base was never the same.

In February 1996 an F-104ASA of the wing came down in the industrial zone north of Grosseto, between two warehouses with around ten workers inside, a few hundred metres from the Aurelia. Nobody on the ground was killed. Local coverage still calls it a miracle, and it is the incident older Grossetani bring up when the subject of the base comes round.

The first Eurofighter F-2000 arrived on 16 March 2004 and the 4° Stormo became the first Italian wing on the type. It went operational for national airspace surveillance in 2005 and has not stopped since: 50,000 wing flight hours by May 2018 and 70,000 by January 2022. On 19 March 2021 a Grosseto Typhoon flew the wing’s first full-load swing-role mission — four GBU-48s, six missiles, six tanks and a Litening pod on one aircraft — which is the practical definition of what "swing role" is supposed to mean.

Quick reaction alert at Grosseto is two armed Typhoons and their crews held at short readiness, continuously, covering central Italy as part of the NATO integrated air defence system. It is a mundane job that occasionally is not. The overwhelming majority of scrambles are for civil aircraft that have lost radio contact — a stuck frequency, a failed radio, a crew that has missed a handover — and the fighters go up to look at the aeroplane, establish what is happening and escort it if required.

The visible side of it is the sonic boom. Grosseto scrambles are routinely audible across Tuscany, Umbria and as far north as Emilia, because an intercept flown at supersonic speed over land makes a noise that arrives before the explanation does. Italian regional newspapers now publish an explainer of what a scramble is every time it happens, which is a small, unglamorous public-information function that the wing has effectively acquired.

A more sombre thread also runs through Grosseto and the alert mission. On the night of 27 June 1980, when Itavia flight 870 came down off Ustica with the loss of all 81 people aboard, Italian reporting has long held that two F-104s were scrambled from Grosseto that night to search the crash area and could not find it in poor visibility; the detail is not in the published inquiry record. Earlier that evening a TF-104G from the base, crewed by two 4° Stormo instructors, Mario Naldini and Ivo Nutarelli, had transmitted an emergency code as it returned north.

Both men later joined the Frecce Tricolori and both died at Ramstein in 1988. The judicial inquiry led by Judge Rosario Priore regarded them as significant and inconvenient witnesses, which is why the two disasters are so often linked in Italian public argument. No investigation has ever established a connection between them, and the Ramstein finding of pilot error stands on its own evidence.