[2] When he was eight years old, the family reportedly moved to northern Italy, to a place near the Swiss-Italian border in the province of Como.

[3][4] In any case, Spelterini turned up in the mid-1870s in Paris, and in 1877 he was licensed by the Académie d'Aérostation météorologique de France as a balloon pilot.

[7] The initial skepticism of the people vanished quickly, and his starts soon attracted crowds wherever he turned up: Zurich, Winterthur, St. Gall, Interlaken, Vevey, ...[6] His endeavours also caught the attention of scientists.

The winds drove the balloon across Les Diablerets and then further westwards, across Lake Neuchatel and the Jura Mountains, until they descended near Besançon in France.

In 1904, he spent several months in Egypt, and in 1911, he even travelled to South Africa, yet he returned each time to Switzerland.

But Spelterini brought back stunning photographs of the landscape seen from above that won awards repeatedly at aeronautical expositions in Milan, Paris, Brussels, or Frankfurt.

He retired as an independent gentleman to Coppet near Geneva with his wife Emma (née Karpf), whom he had married on 28 January 1914 in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

In 1922, he hired out as a showman at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, posing for photos and taking people for short rides in a captive balloon.

[13] Disappointed, he retired to Zipf near Vöcklabruck in Austria, where he had bought a small house and lived from the sale of the eggs of his 300 chickens.