Love and War in the Apennines
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| Author | Eric Newby |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Hodder & Stoughton |
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Publication date
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1971 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 224 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 36408373 |
Love and War in the Apennines is a 1971 Second World War memoir (with some changes of names and people and places, and some composite characters) by Eric Newby. It was dramatised as the 2001 film In Love and War starring Callum Blue and Barbora Bobuľová.
After the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces in 1943, the author left the prison camp in which he had been held for a year and evaded the Germans by going to ground high in the mountains and forests south of the Po River. In enforced isolation, he was sheltered and protected by an informal and highly courageous network of Italian peasants. Newby writes a powerful account of these idiosyncratic and selfless people and also of their bleak and very basic lifestyle. He undergoes a series of bizarre, funny and often dangerous incidents, and in the process meets Wanda, a local girl who later becomes his wife.
Newby takes part in a Special Boat Service operation on the east coast of Sicily. He and his colleagues fail to make their rendezvous with a British submarine and are picked up by a fishing boat.
Newby is imprisoned in an orphanage at Fontanellato in the Po valley. With the Armistizio, the Italians let the English prisoners escape. Because Newby has a broken ankle he is abandoned and is hidden in a farmer's hay loft until an Italian doctor takes him to the hospital. Here he is visited by Wanda, the daughter of a Slovene teacher, who gives him Italian lessons in exchange for English lessons and they fall in love. The Germans discover he is there but Newby escapes and hides, moving from one house to another.
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