Book Review

The Life of Felice Benuzzi

You may well know the name Felice Benuzzi, who in 1943 achieved one of the most amazing mountaineering feats of all time. Now his life story has been told.

Felice was born (in Vienna - he had three Austrian grandparents) to climb: he went to his first mountain refuge as a baby swaddled in his father's rucksack. In his early years in the Julian Alps and the Dolomites hardly anyone was about, some peaks were unnamed and many had never been scaled. Towards the end, better access and equipment brought the world to the valleys and slopes, and he approved of that. He was a founder member of Mountain Wilderness.

He lived in extraordinary times. After university in Rome - where he graduated in law and swam competitively at international level - he was sent by the Mussolini regime on colonial service in Africa. In 1938, a week before racial laws forbidding just such an act, he married Stefania, a Berlin-born Jewess. In Ethiopia he fought for his country and was decorated for valour. Captured in 1941 he was sent to a POW camp in Kenya. From there he could see Africa's second highest mountain, Mount Kenya. He escaped and scaled it, without maps and with only the roughest equipment made in secret, through jungle foothills alive with wild animals to blizzards at the summit. In July 1946 he at last got home and was reunited with Stefania and their daughter, a baby when he last saw her and now six years old.

Joining the foreign service, Felice served in France, Australia and Pakistan. In Berlin he was Consul General at the height of the Cold War and he ended his career as ambassador to Uruguay. While there he climbed in the Andes and visited Antarctica. On his retirement he was given a key role in promoting Italy's Antarctic interests. He was able to climb in New Zealand and, six months before he died, he made it up the Ruapehu volcano.

He began writing and was published while at university; as a diplomat he contributed scores of witty and colourful articles to magazines and journals on travel and other themes. He was athletic, intellectual and an attractive personality; when he entered a room, heads turned.

Felice told his own story in No Picnic on Mount Kenya, which came out while he was Consul in Brisbane in 1952. The Heart and the Abyss - the life of Felice Benuzzi will be launched in Brisbane on 1 July, and is available from Amazon.

Rory Steele (Australia)

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