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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.… (more)
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I shall be buying and reading them too now – have found another author to read and to enjoy.
> "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.