Felice benuzzi biography wife

› magazine › no-picnic-on-mount-kenya.

Weird Italy. Felice Benuzzi was an Italian diplomat and mountaineer who escaped a British prison camp in WWII with two fellow soldiers to climb Mount Kenya with improvised equipment and after 18 days broke back into camp. Related article: the Roman expeditions to Nile River. Benuzzi was raised in Trieste before being born to an Austrian mother and an Italian father on November 16, , in Vienna.

He earned a law degree from the University of Rome in while also engaging in a rigorous athletic schedule that included competing in various international swimming competitions between and He was assigned as a Colonial Volunteer, dispatched to Africa in , and sent to Addis Abeba in He was taken prisoner by the British in , and was sent to a prison camp in Kenya.

Deeply distressed and bored by the monotony of prisoner life, one evening he saw the peak of the mountain in a gap in the clouds and was hit by a sudden and apparently crazy idea: escaping from the camp, climbing the mountain, placing the Italian flag on the summit and returning to camp. From this moment on, Felice began to study the mountain, using newspaper articles, sketches from an old book on the Kikuyu tribe, a label of a can of corned beef showing a picture of Mount Kenya as seen from the east, and through some observations of the mountain complex made through binoculars.

The three had to find the necessary materials for the venture. Two ice axes were made from a pair of hammers taken from local workers, and modified by a blacksmith who was their fellow prisoner. Mountain clothing pants, jacket, cap was made from some blankets, modified and sewn by a tailor who was also a prisoner.

Just before racial laws were introduced in Italy which forbid such unions.

The two utilized the administration-provided ropes to connect the bed net to the frame and also used an entire net to construct lanyards out of it. They secured food rations and purchased extra from other convicts. Felice also made several dozen paper indicator arrows, made from a book and painted with enamel, which would later prove essential for their return from the summit attempt during the storm.