Lonely Planet Travel Literature
3 total works
As a fugitive from a POW camp in Northern Italy in 1943, Eric Newby spent three months hiding out in the forests and mountains south of the river Po. This story recounts his experiences and the invaluable aid given by the local people, especially the woman who became his life-long love.
At the age of 18, Eric Newby signed on as an apprentice on the four-masted sailing ship Moshulu of the Erikson line for the round trip from Europe to Australia and back, outwards by way of the Cape of Good Hope and round Cape Horn. This was to be an historic voyage, a dramatic personal adventure.
Since first setting eyes on Italy at the age of 22 through the periscope of a submarine, Eric Newby has come to feel it is the country he knows and understands best. In 1967, he and his wife bought "Il Castagni", otherwise "The Chestnuts", a small and ruinous farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the borders of Liguria and northern Tuscany. They were the first foreigners to live in this particular area, and the only ones. The house came complete with, among other indigenous wildlife, a large colony of cockroaches, a band of predatory mice the size of small cats and, unknown to them when they bought the house, a sitting tenant, Attilio, an extremely eccentric and ancient man who had once built an aeroplane and crashed it. In this book, Eric Newby describes how he and his wife pulled the house back from collapse and tells of their friendship with the neighbouring "contadini", country people, which endured for 25 years, and a way of life now changed almost beyond recognition.