No Picnic on Mount Kenya - Hardcover

"A first-rate humanistic account that should quite simply be considered a classic of Italian literature."--Pietro Spirito, Il Piccolo

"There are dangerous adventures, and then there's the story of Felice Benuzzi and his fellow Italian soldiers escaping a British POW camp because, 'one had only to start taking risks again.' It's a strange and exciting story."--Men's Journal

"Benuzzi's sketches and his glorious writing and humor make this an incomparable tribute to camaraderie and daring."
--Jane Manaster, San Francisco Book Review


"Mr. Benuzzi's paradoxical mixture of pride and self-mocking humility is attractive: his courage is amazing; his story, dramatic."--The New York Times

"A most extraordinary prisoner-of-war and escape story."--The New Yorker

"More electrifying than anything a person with a nose for real adventure could hope to read."--Piero Melati, Repubblica

"A hymn to mountaineering and adventure."--Marco Valle, Il Secolo

"[No Picnic on Mount Kenya] crackles with the same dry humor as its title. It contains the prison-yard bartering and candlelight stitching that mark a classic jailbreak yarn; the encounters with wild beasts in Mount Kenya's forest belt are as gripping, and the descriptions of sparkling glaciers as awe-inspiring, as any passage in the great exploration diaries of the early twentieth century."--The Economist

Felice Benuzzi was born in Vienna in 1910 and grew up in Trieste, doing his early mountaineering in the Julian Alps. He studied law at the University of Rome and represented Italy as an international swimmer in 1933-35. He served in the Italian Colonial Service in Abyssinia until his imprisonment in 1941, and wrote both the English and Italian versions of No Picnic on Mount Kenya during the last years of his captivity. Following the conclusion of the war he worked as a diplomat, including with the United Nations. He died in Rome in 1988.