Love and War in the Apennines
By Eric Newby
4/5
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About this ebook
Hailed as Newby's 'masterpiece', ‘Love and War in the Apennines’ is the gripping real-life story of Newby's imprisonment and escape from an Italian prison camp during World War II.
After the Italian Armistice of 1943, Eric Newby escaped from the prison camp in which he'd been held for a year. He evaded the German army by hiding in the caves and forests of Fontanellato, in Italy's Po Valley. Against this picturesque backdrop, he was sheltered for three months by an informal network of Italian peasants, who fed, supported and nursed him, before his eventual recapture.
‘Love and War in the Apennines’ is Newby's tribute to the selfless and courageous people who were to be his saviours and companions during this troubled time and of their bleak and unchanging way of life. Of the cast of idiosyncratic characters, most notable was the beautiful local girl on a bike who would teach him the language, and eventually help him escape; two years later they were married and would spend the rest of their lives as co-adventurers. Part travelogue, part escape story and part romance, this is a mesmerising account of wisdom, courage, humour and adventure, and tells the story of the early life of a man who would become one of Britain's best-loved literary adventurers.
Eric Newby
Eric Newby was born in London in 1919. During World War II, he served in the Special Boat Section and was captured. He married the girl who helped him to escape, and for the next 50 years she was at his side on many adventures. After the war, he worked in the fashion business and book publishing but travelled on a grand scale, sometimes as the Travel Editor for the Observer. He was made CBE and awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers. He died in 2006.
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Reviews for Love and War in the Apennines
95 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I've liked Newby before, but in this the writing was surprisingly bad. (Just one example: ten "and"s and two pages into a sentence, maybe it is time to start a new one?) The story is also not exceptional. Still, Newby is honest. The story picks up when he gets into dialog, and there are several humorous anecdotes, including meeting a German soldier hunting butterflies in the mountains. > "Do not be afraid," he went on. "I will not tell anyone that I have met you, I have no intention of spoiling such a splendid day either for you or for myself. They are too rare." … None of them had ever heard of butterfly hunting, or laid eyes on a butterfly hunter, so that when he asked a man and his wife who were on their way to attend mass in the village, for by this time there was no one else in sight to ask in his painstaking Italian what was the best way to the top of the mountain, they thought he must be a lunatic to want to go fishing on the top of a mountain which was over four and a half thousand feet high.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Now that is what good wrting is all about. Such a limpid style; it flows along like a mountain stream. Newby relates his wartime experiences, from Operation Whynot in Sicily when he was captured, to his escape from an "orphanage" (prison camp) in northern Italy where he met Wanda who taught him some Italian, hiding out in the mountains and helped by the villagers who brought him food and built a hut for him. I was swept away by his story and even shed tears at the end.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Newby was a commando who was sent ashore from a submarine to attempt to destroy German aircraft on a German airfield in Sicily. The effort was for naught & while swimming back to the sub, he and four of his 5 companions were picked up by Sicilian fishermen. He ended up in an Italian prison camp. When the Italians pulled out of the war, Newby & the other prisoners fled the camp before the Germans took over. The memoir covers the period he was on the run from the Germans & the Italian Fascist militia constantly on the move from one hiding place to another all aided by Italian families who faced death for doing so. He fell in love with one of his rescuers and married her after the war but that is covered in another book entitled "Something Wholesale". Much of the time Newby was hiding in primitive facilities in cold, wet weather and his descriptions of his discomfort come off the page to the point that I felt the chill. His warm feelings for the poor, uneducated people who did everything to keep him free & alive appear to be the main reason he has written this volume.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Newby parachutes into Sicily during WWII and is captured by the Germans. He ends up in a POW camp in northern Italy where he falls in love with an Italian nurse. When the Italians surrender, he escapes into the hills where he is housed by partisans and spends sometime in a cave in the Appennines. Unfortunately he is recaptured. After the war he returns to Italy and marries his Italian nurse. He chronicles his return to Italy and the home he makes in Lunigiana in [A Small Place In Italy]. He is well known as a travel writer; however, this book is in the nature of a memoir. All his books are excellent.