Since his early childhood Mario was attracted by life at sea. In 1898 he entered the Naval Academy in Livorno, and graduated as a midshipman in 1901. During his Livorno years he was known by his classmates for always dreaming about human flight, something which was totally unknown in those days, except for the successful gliding flights of Otto Lilienthal (who fell to his death in 1896) and the aborted powered flight of Clement Ader in France. Mario's classmates were joking about his flying mania, and one of them made a sketch of Calderara on a flying machine, crashing to the ground and being carried to a hospital, and then to a cemetery.
In 1905, Mario Calderara wrote to the Wright brothers in Dayton Ohio, after hearing about their successful attempts at flying (a documented record of their flights was known only after 1905). He asked them about technical details and was pleasantly surprised when he received a satisfactory answer from Wilbur and Orville, as well as from F.C. Bishop, president of Aeroclub of the United States. This correspondence continued during the following years and formed the basis of a friendship which lasted throughout his entire life. Calderara had already made some experiments in 1903 and 1904 with primitive gliders, and had studied the behavior of a flat surface on an incline calculating its coefficient of resistance to the wind (together with the Italian engineer Canovetti, he utilized the funicular from Como to Brunate as a slope for making his calculations).
