AERONAUTICA
MILITARE

A sports centre with a chain of command

Italy runs its athletics differently. Most of the country's elite compete not for civilian clubs but for the sports groups of its armed forces and police — Fiamme Gialle, Fiamme Oro, Carabinieri, Esercito — and one of them belongs to the Air Force. The Centro Sportivo dell'Aeronautica Militare was created in 1964, when the Italian state decided to professionalise sport inside its uniformed corps, and settled at Vigna di Valle on Lake Bracciano, a former airship field northwest of Rome. The six-lane track sits where the hangars used to be.

Its athletes are actual servicemen and women. To wear this vest you enlist — the entry route is a Ministry of Defence call-up reserved for athletes of national interest — and you hold rank and draw an Air Force salary while training full time. At London 2012, 29 of Italy's 290 Olympians came through the Air Force programme.

This chapter hangs off our Clubs Sponsored line hub, alongside the Oregon Project, FC Barcelona athletics and CA Montreuil 93.

From Mennea to Fabbri

The athletics roll of the Centro Sportivo runs deep. The corps' own honour list reaches back to Giorgio Oberweger, a discus thrower of the 1930s who was also a pilot, and counts sprint great Pietro Mennea and triple jumper Giuseppe Gentile among the names that passed through. Long jumper Andrew Howe is on it too.

One clarification matters, because it is the most common mistake made about Italian athletics: neither Gianmarco Tamberi nor Yeman Crippa is an Aeronautica athlete — both compete for the state police's Fiamme Oro. The Air Force's current track and field group includes triple jumpers Dariya Derkach and Emmanuel Ihemeje, high jumper Marco Fassinotti, hurdler Yadisleidy Pedroso and steeplechaser Osama Zoghlami — and one genuine superstar of the moment.

That is Leonardo Fabbri, the shot putter whose service record fills the chart above: a 22.82 m bomb in 2025 that led the world, a twelfth national title in February 2026 with the year's world lead already his — and the podiums he has stood on for Italy since 2023, in the federation's kit rather than this one. The best putter Italy has ever had is, administratively, an airman.

The kit: issued, crested, never sold

The two Aeronautica pieces in this archive are training kit in the corps' service navy: a heavyweight cotton jacket and a matching polo, both crested, both new with their tags still on. They read more like issued uniform than sportswear — which is exactly what they are: kit for enlisted athletes, distributed through the team channel of a military sports centre.

From this club · in the archiveNike Aeronautica Militare Pro Elite JacketThe Air Force training jacket in service navy — crested cotton, new with tags, nothing about it retail.150,00 €View piece →

From this club · in the archiveNike Aeronautica Militare Pro Elite PoloThe matching polo — the other half of the corps' training uniform in the archive.100,00 €View piece →

A note on the maker, in the archive's usual spirit of honesty: Nike publishes nothing about dressing the Centro Sportivo, and neither does the Air Force. The swoosh on these garments is the record that it happens; how long the arrangement has run is not documented anywhere we can cite, so we do not claim it.

The corps in 2026

Sixty-two years in, the Centro Sportivo is arguably at a high-water mark: its putter leads the world lists, its jumpers make global finals, and the military-athlete model that produced them remains the backbone of Italian track and field — a system where a montepremi is a salary and a training base is an air base.

For the archive, that permanence cuts the other way from the Oregon Project's ending. These pieces are rare not because the club died but because military training kit is issued to soldiers, worn on a base, and almost never leaves the channel at all. Two pieces surfacing together is the event; the grid below holds them, alongside the rest of the club line.