Emilio Lussu

Un anno sull'altipiano

Un año en el altiplano

Marcia su Roma e dintorni

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author's experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu's memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.

The Classic Italian Memoir of World War 1

A Soldier on the Southern Front

Readers seeking to understand the resurgence of fascism in the world today should profit from Emilio Lussu's account. This is an autobiography through which the reader encounters men and women caught up in the brutalizing of a State whose opponents suffer the consequences of holding to principle. In Sardinia in the 1920's a bourgeois class fell easy prey to fascism. Lussu's personal, humorous, warm, perceptive, ironic and telling account of his own humiliation and punishment, affords the reader the unique perspective of a man at the centre of opposition to a movement which would eventually plunge Europe into war.

Emilio Lussu

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