Six years after Kitty Hawk, the plain between Brescia and Montichiari was one of the best places in Europe to fly: absolutely flat, obstacle-free and large. The Circuito Aereo Internazionale ran there from 8 to 20 September 1909 and drew the people who mattered in early aviation. Glenn Curtiss won the Grand Prix de Brescia over five laps of a fifty-kilometre course. Mario Calderara, a Wright pupil and the Italian navy’s first aviator, won the passenger-carrying event. Henri Rougier took the altitude prize at 198.5 metres.

It is worth being exact, because Italian accounts of Ghedi routinely credit that altitude record to Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was there as a celebrity rather than a competitor, and some add the Wright brothers, who were not there at all. The real list of names is impressive enough without the embroidery.

The spectator who made the meeting famous was a 26-year-old insurance official from Prague. Franz Kafka went with Max and Otto Brod and wrote "Die Aeroplane in Brescia", one of the very first pieces of literary prose about powered flight. It is a strange, watchful piece, more interested in the crowd and in D’Annunzio moving through it than in the machines, and it is almost the only reason a literary reader has ever heard of this corner of Lombardy.

In 1944 the Todt Organisation rebuilt the airfield from the ground up. The figure usually given is sixty-five kilometres of runways, taxiways, dispersals and hardstandings, together with workshops, blast pens and bunkers, and a concrete link strip joining Ghedi to the field at Montichiari. It is an enormous amount of concrete for the last full year of a lost war, and it set the footprint the modern base still occupies.

The Americans attacked Ghedi more than thirty times. The defenders got good at deception: aircraft parked under trees and covered with netting, wooden decoys on the open dispersals, oily rags set burning beside damaged machines so that photographic reconnaissance would score them as destroyed. Declassified American intelligence files also record V-1 activity here, and the concrete stubs of what look like launch-ramp supports still stand at the southern edge of the field.

When the United States Fifth Army arrived on 29 April 1945 it found bomb craters eight metres across. Part of the site became a prisoner-of-war cage, one of whose inmates was General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, the German corps commander at Cassino. The field was reactivated for the air force in 1951.

The 6° Stormo was re-formed at Treviso on 1 January 1951 on the basis of the 155° Gruppo, flying P-51 Mustangs, and moved to Ghedi as the 6ª Aerobrigata on 15 June 1951. Vampires and F-84G Thunderjets followed, the F-84F Thunderstreak from 1956 and the F-104G Starfighter from 1963. In spring 1964 the wing’s 156° Gruppo became the first Italian unit qualified for nuclear strike, holding four aircraft at twenty minutes’ readiness under joint Italian and American guard.

On 27 August 1982 the first Panavia Tornado set its wheels down at Ghedi, going to the 154° Gruppo. The aircraft it replaced was the Starfighter, which is a fair measure of the leap involved: from a point-defence interceptor pressed into the strike role to a two-seat, terrain-following, all-weather bomber designed for exactly that job. The first Italian-assembled Tornado had flown from Turin-Caselle on 5 December 1975 under Egidio Nappi.

Ghedi became the Tornado’s administrative centre as well as its home. The 102° Gruppo "Paperi" transferred in from Rimini on 13 September 1993, and when the trinational Tornado training establishment at Cottesmore closed in 1999 it took on the conversion of every Italian Tornado crew. On 14 September 2016 the 50° Stormo at Piacenza was disbanded and its 155° Gruppo moved to Ghedi, leaving the base the only Tornado field in Italy.

The aircraft went almost everywhere Italy did: the Gulf in 1991, Deliberate Force and Allied Force over the Balkans, Afghanistan from November 2008, Libya in 2011 and Kuwait against Daesh from 2014. In the Kosovo campaign alone the 155° Gruppo flew 176 defence-suppression missions and fired 115 HARM missiles.

Italy sent eight Tornado IDS and two spares to Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates for Operation Locusta, drawn from the 6° Stormo at Ghedi, the 36° at Gioia del Colle and the 50° at Piacenza. On the first night of Desert Storm, 17 to 18 January 1991, a formation under the call sign Legion 15 launched against an ammunition depot at Unysh in southern Iraq.

The refuelling went badly. The weather over the Gulf was violent, the tanker track was crowded, and of the roughly thirty allied aircraft working that tanker only one Italian Tornado completed its bracket: the aircraft flown by Major Gianmarco Bellini with Captain Maurizio Cocciolone in the back seat. They pressed on alone and put five Mk 83 retarded bombs on the target, which was later assessed as destroyed.

About forty seconds after release the aircraft was hit by a ZSU-23-4 battery. Both men ejected and were captured almost at once by Republican Guard troops. Cocciolone appeared on Iraqi television on 20 January, visibly injured, in footage that became one of the defining images of the war in Italy. They were held for forty-seven days, separated and mistreated, and released on 3 March 1991 — the only Italian prisoners of war of the conflict, from the only Italian aircraft lost.

The crew belonged to the 155° Gruppo, which had converted to the Tornado at Ghedi in the later 1980s and has been based at Ghedi again since 2016, so the squadron that lost the aircraft is today the last Italian Tornado unit. Over forty-two days of combat the detachment flew 226 sorties for 589 flying hours, and the Tornados came home on 15 March 1991.

Start with what is officially published. The United States Air Force lists the 704th Munitions Support Squadron as a tenant unit on the Italian air base at Ghedi, under the 52nd Munitions Maintenance Group at Spangdahlem in Germany. That is not a leak or an estimate; it is on a USAF installation website. NATO also acknowledges in general terms that American nuclear weapons are forward deployed in Europe under nuclear sharing, and that allied aircraft are assigned to deliver them.

What is not officially published is where. Neither the Italian nor the United States government confirms that nuclear weapons are stored at Ghedi, and both decline to comment on the location of any weapon. Italian ministers, asked repeatedly in parliament, have fallen back on the alliance rule that member states neither confirm nor deny.

The estimates come from independent analysts, chiefly Hans Kristensen and his colleagues at the Federation of American Scientists, whose Nuclear Notebook in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has tracked the deployment for decades. Their 2025 assessment is that about 100 B61-3 and B61-4 bombs sit at six bases in five countries — Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, Büchel in Germany, Incirlik in Turkey, Kleine Brogel in Belgium and Volkel in the Netherlands — with no published breakdown by base. Kristensen’s earlier work on Ghedi described eleven aircraft shelters fitted with underground vaults, completed in 1997, holding an estimated twenty weapons, the first American bombs having arrived in December 1963. His reasoning is blunt: the munitions support squadron "would not be at the base unless there were nuclear weapons present".

There is also one piece of inadvertent, official-adjacent confirmation. A draft report for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s defence and security committee, written under the Canadian senator Joseph Day and circulated in April 2019, named the six bases where the bombs are stored, Ghedi-Torre among them. The Belgian newspaper De Morgen noticed; a revised version without the list appeared the following week. Senator Day called the original a draft built on open-source material and a NATO official said it was not an official NATO document. The Parliamentary Assembly is not NATO’s command structure, so this is not a government confirmation — but it is not a blogger either.

The honest summary: the American unit is confirmed, no government confirms the weapons, and the estimate of roughly twenty B61s at Ghedi out of about a hundred in Europe comes from named analysts with a consistent record. Italian sources quote anything from twenty to forty, which measures how much is genuinely unknown.

The conversion was an infrastructure project before it was a flying one. The design contract went to Proger with Manens-Tifs in June 2018: a maintenance hangar, a three-storey T-shaped command building with simulators, an 1,100 square-metre warehouse and two flight lines of fifteen shelters each, every shelter 440 square metres and sized for two aircraft. Reported construction values differ — around 60 million euro in one account, 91 million in another — and the designs had to satisfy Italian and American authorities.

The first F-35A, MM7366 coded 6-01, landed at Ghedi on 16 June 2022, escorted in by three Tornados and flying past with them before it touched down. A second followed about a month later. The 102° Gruppo, the old Tornado conversion unit, was the first Ghedi squadron to move to the new aircraft.

The emotional moment came three years later. On 2 July 2025 the 154° Gruppo unveiled a commemorative scheme in which half a Tornado and half an F-35 meet along the fuselage, with a rising sun recalling the squadron’s Gulf War motto, "Banzai — in picchiata sull’obiettivo". On 4 July it handed over the Tornado after forty-three years.

The Tornado is not finished. What remains is concentrated in the 155° Gruppo, which holds the defence-suppression capability the F-35 does not yet fully replace in Italian service, and Italian reporting expects those aircraft to fly until at least 2030. The wing passed 5,000 F-35 hours in April 2026.