Intro

In 1941, during World War II, an officer in the Italian colonial government in Ethiopia named Felice Benuzzi was captured by the British army and sent by train to a prisoner of war camp in Kenya, about ten miles from the equator. Benuzzi was a climber and dreamer and romantic, and Camp 354, while humane, was numbing and monotonous and gray. What was it like for this young father, who’d felt the thrill of air beneath his heels on the craggy walls of the Dolomites, to wake up that first morning of incarceration and not know when the war would end or how long he’d be held there? What was it like on the second day, when he woke again and it was identical to the first? Or the third, when he faced the same gruel of routine and knew that it stretched as far into the future as he could see?

Benuzzi’s response to his situation was radical, implausible, and more than a little