Love and War in the Apennines

Published in 1971, this wartime memoir follows Eric Newby after his capture in North Africa and imprisonment in a camp in northern Italy. When the 1943 armistice opens the gates, he walks into the Apennine foothills and is hidden by farmers who risk German reprisal. He records harvest work, hunger, snow, and the network of peasants, priests, and fellow fugitives who move him from hut to hut. He also meets Wanda, a Slovene woman living in the valley, who helps him and later becomes his wife. The book is an escape-and-shelter narrative, not a campaign history: an account of occupied rural Italy as seen by a prisoner on the run.

Bound in cloth blocked with a design by the artist.