Our history

In the late 1960s an interministerial committee, later known as the Caron Committee, was charged with drawing up the report on the Italian aerospace industry and its development requested by the Interministerial Committee on Economic Planning (CIPE). For the first time the report found that supporting the development of the domestic aerospace industry required an appropriate research center along the lines of those already existing in other advanced countries.

A few years later, in 1978, the Italian Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) put forward the first comprehensive proposal to identify the requirements of the proposed research center. On 20 July 1979 CIPE voted to confirm the creation of the center and to position it in the Campania region of Southern Italy. In December 1978 Vito Scalia, then minister for Science and Technology Research, named Professor Giuseppe Gabrielli chairman of the committee charged with evaluating the concept. The committee expressed a positive opinion on the plan and listed in its own report the initial needs in terms of facilities and research. In  reply to a request from Scalia, three engineering firms – Italimpianti, Fiat Engineering and Technipetrol – then formed a consortium to carry out a feasibility study funded by the Cassa del Mezzogiorno development agency.

The consortium delivered its report to the Cassa on 3 August 1983. In April 1984 the study was reviewed and approved by a further interministerial committee. This formed the basis for the creation on July 9, 1984 of CIRA ScpA, a company whose shareholders included the Campania regional government and a majority of the Italian aerospace companies and AIA members; Lombardy was also in agreement. On March 9 1985 Law no. 110 approved 35 billion lira as initial funding for CIRA. On November 28 CIPE voted on the feasibility study, approving with amendments suggested by Professors Napolitano, Buongiorno and Laurienzo. On December 12 the CIRA board of directors identified Capua airfield as the site of the future center.

In 1986 CIPE tasked CIRA ScpA with the executive design, construction and management of the Italian Aerospace Research Center and called the Ministry for Scientific Research to prepare the decree specifying the legal instruments and administrative processes required to fund and operate the Center. On March 23, 1988 the government introduced in Parliament the draft bill titled “Creation and operation of the National Aerospace Research Center”, which served as basis for Law 184, approved in 1989 with the new title “Creation and operation of the National Aerospace Research Program”.

From that moment CIRA was finally able to launch its activities within a clearly defined legal and administrative framework. A crucial figure in the initial start-up years was Luigi G. Napolitano, the Neapolitan scientist who was called to chair the CIRA Technical Scientific Board. Napolitano made a huge contribution to identifying the Center’s main development thrust and was eventually appointed Chairman of CIRA by the Minister of Scientific Research, sadly only a few days before his untimely death in July 1991.

Future and memory

The CIRA facilities built for PRORA have radically changed the local landscape. Despite this, over the years CIRA has carefully safeguarded the innumerable archaeological materials found on its site, densely populated from the distant past. Specific digs, researches and studies carried out in 1994 by the local Archaeology Superintendence led to the identification of various significant areas.

These include a complete Neolithic village, located near the present Cooling Towers; a Roman ruin, in the protected area along the North border of the site; a Roman villa, near the current general warehouse and including traces of the perimeter wall and human remains.

CIRA cherishes the idea that the overall improvement of the area, achieved by building CIRA and its infrastructures, also feeds on such “rediscoveries” and there exists an ideal link between the evidence of very ancient forms of civilization and today’s high value, forward-looking activities.