Somehow, Lauro made his way from Corsica to Geneva without being intercepted by the French police. There R.D. joined him and for the next five or six weeks they moved from the home of the Ernest Schellings – R.D.’s long-time friends – near Geneva (where their names do not appear in the Guest Book) to one small inn after another in Switzerland and in the Black Forest where they bicycled and kept out of sight. Salvemini had warned Lauro that they should not stay together in any one place where they could be traced – where R.D. was, Lauro was likely to be found also. At the Leichtflugzeugclub near Munich Lauro arranged to buy another airplane, an early Messerschmitt, D-1783, and received a few hours instruction in flying it.

Lauro’s problems were many, they were serious, they were frustrating. “It seems only yesterday,” he had written to his mother in June, in a letter he could not send, “it seems only yesterday that you used to tell me about Bellerphon’s difficulties in conquering Pegasus. And yet his difficulties were a mere trifle compared to mine.” There were technical problems with the airplane, with the mechanical ejector for scattering the leaflets, with the weather, illness, error, lost letters, fear of detection; many dates were set and then postponed. Single-mindedly, Lauro pressed on, giving little thought to his return flight which he considered “problematical” – the Fascist Airforce would surely rise at once to destroy his slower, unarmed little “bird.” “But for me personally this has no interest. Rome has become for me like Cape Horn for the Flying Dutchman.” He would send to Ferrari a “posthumous article – in caso di incidenti.”

Lauro had a strong sense of the value of life: when a man had fulfilled his task, accomplished a great purpose, had reached his supreme, climactic moment, then his life, in Lauro’s opinion, had been justified; the book of life could be closed and if the closing in itself made a statement, so much the better. “For me,” he said, “it is the better way to live my life intensely;... besides, I have a very urgent debt to pay with this [flight] otherwise my life will be intolerable.” It had also become essential to Lauro to prove that his Icarus was “not just rhetoric,” that he could not be brushed aside as the leader of the Alleanza Nazionale. Ignored at the trial, the lack of a death sentence made it necessary to challenge death.

Was Lauro religious? Yes, if to be “religious” is to be highly idealistic, supremely moral, committed to the right, the just, the highest possible – or impossible – standards. He had no fear of death nor had he the usual attitude toward it. “Life never puzzled him,” R.D. wrote, “he felt himself part of the cosmic ‘order’ and accepted and rejoiced in life as it was, with all its conflicts.” Lauro had grown up in a Catholic country but not in a Catholic family. Religion appears to have played little, probably no part in his day-to-day life. God existed. God presided over His world. This he accepted. Whatever feelings Lauro may have had of awe, of elevation, were expressed in poetry. Although his own world was crowded with Gods and Goddesses, he looked to no power outside himself; he, himself, would judge and determine and be responsible. It was very simple. “The great moving force of history,” Lauro wrote, “is not Providence but the human will.”

With his real interest in science, Lauro, in March of 1923, with other students, had organized a Centenary Commemoration of Ernest Renan, the French writer and historian of religion. The date happened to coincide with the dedication to St. Thomas Aquinas of a Roman church. There was great public interest in the Renan celebration but in the Vatican there was consternation; the Pope, Pius XI, found it necessary to order expiatory prayers to be said in all the churches of Rome. In Paris, during this winter of his exile, Lauro called on Renan’s daughter. He also wrote an essay, The Religion of Freedom, to be given on a lecture tour he then planned to make on his return to America after his flight to Rome. “The development of the mind,” Renan had written, “depends on freedom.”

Lauro’s was a world of intellectuals, of scholars, writers and, particularly, of philosophers. Wide as its minds ranged, its physical boundaries were limited. Lauro thought and acted from within his own world of heroes and myths, of ideals and honor. Realism, pragmatism, these elements he recognized but his motivation came so strongly from within this self that basically he acted to satisfy its inner compulsions.

Lauro burned, as he had at twenty-one, with the need to win the laurel wreath: the image of the hero still possessed him. Death was probable but by his death he would join that select and silent band of martyrs, those few heroes who gave their lives to rouse Italians to the malignancy of Fascism, to the realization that only by its overthrow lay the path to freedom for their 42 million. Lauro “convinced that Fascism will not end until some twenty young people sacrifice their lives in order to awaken the spirit of the Italians.... If soon there will be five or six ‘free lances’ prepared to fly across the Italian sky – like Bassanesi – bringing the glad tidings of freedom, Italy’s torpor will vanish and her people will again move forward on the grand road to freedom.... It is necessary to die.”