Amedeo

Om boken

War-time love story set in Abyssinia, Eritrea and the Yemen 1935-1945. This is the story of Amedeo Guillet – an Italian cavalry officer who was sent out to Abyssinia as part of Mussolini's army to establish and command a troupe of 2,000 Spahis – or Arabic cavalry. He met and fell in love with Khadija – a beautiful Ethiopian Muslim. Together they held up the British lorries heaving up the mountain road to Asmara and blew up the important Ponte Aosta. Eventually captured, Amedeo went on the run disguised as an Arab, eventually making it to Yemen, only to be thrown in jail. This is a rare view of the Second World War from an Italian perspective; particularly valuable are the chapters that tell the story of Italian resistance to the Nazis, and their subsequent withdrawal from Italy in 1943. Fascist Italy, his early years in Ethiopia commanding the Cossack-like Spahis, the brutal Abyssinian war waged by the Duce, Italian and British colonial rivalry – Amedeo led the last ever cavalry charge the British army faced (Eritrea 1941 – they were massacred by tanks and sub-machine guns). Defeat and guerrilla warfare against the British followed, then flight disguised as an Arab, imprisonment in the Yemen, and a great love lost as he leaves his beloved Khadija behind to face her future alone and returns to Italy, to his fiancée and a career as a distinguished Italian diplomat and Arabist.