Paolo Miana's "Lost Archives - Pictorial history of SIAI - Chapter I - the Sorci Verdi"

The perfect book when you want a perfect model!

This well-designed, skillfully-written, graphics-packed book just came to light.

Paolo Miana, the author, a well-known and respected aviation historian, had access to material that was not available before to the public, resulting in a wealth of information and images on the subject. This is the first on a series of books that will deal with all the material he was able to reserach which includes other subjects.

When I started to read the book I was delighted by the graphic design. As I was reading more and more I realized that the level and the quality and detail of the technical and historical  information was amazing. I was literally glued to the book until I finished it -the first reading anyway, since I want now to carefully go through making notes of all the relevant information for my conversion of existing scale model kits to the versions described in the book-. The quality of the photos and graphics is truly superlative, so is the step-by-step narrative covering the genesis, development and achievements of this beautiful subject. Historians and aviation buffs will be delighted, and scale modelers will be...well...in heaven. This publication is the proverbial gold mine for those that admire this racers / record-breakers.
The chapters include:

-S.79 Corsa

from the outside

-S.79 Corsa

technical details

-Istres Damascus Paris

visit to SIAI

-Istres Damascus Paris

the race

-Across the Atlantic

-Rome to Brazil

-Bibliography

My congratulations to Mr. Paolo Miana on a job superbly done.

Paolo Miana's first book, "L'Ala di gabbiano con la finezza di uno stradivario", was an excellent reference material that I reviewed and you could use to scracthbuild the SIAI S.64:

http://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2014/07/scratch-built-172-savoia-marchetti-s64.html

This new book has all the info you need to make a perfect replica of a Sorci Verdi machine, and you can find it here:
http://www.amazon.it/SIAI-Lost-archives-Vol-I-Sorci/dp/3735778267/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1410107994&sr=8-13&keywords=SIAI
and have a peek here:
http://issuu.com/paolomiana/docs/brief_en

The author can be reached here:
paolo.miana(at)gmail.com 

I am no stranger to a conversion of this sort and already adapted the Italeri kit to build a civil Ala Littoria machine:
http://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2014/07/converted-172-italeri-sm79.html

Now, having this excellent reference, I am considering again the two candidates for conversion: the venerable Airfix kit or the new Italeri version that I already used before.
I also acquired the Pavla conversion set.

Here is the posting with the construction of the model:
http://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2014/09/172-scale-siai-s79-corsa-conversion.html