A High Mission: Umberto Nobile & Roald Amundsen, two fates tied to the North Pole

Book info: A High Mission: Umberto Nobile & Roald Amundsen, two fates tied to the North Pole (Paperback, 112 pages) – Hun in the Sun, 2025. Language: English.

The book is composed of six chapters, plus an appendix, and features the prefaces of the Ambassador of Norway to Italy and the Mayor of Lauro.

In just over a hundred pages, the author Antonio Ventre, director of the Umberto Nobile Museum in Lauro, condenses a captivating, varied, and complex story that has fascinated a vast international audience for nearly a century, with the North Pole as its focal point – a destination longed for by visionary explorers such as General Umberto Nobile and Roald Amundsen.

The narrative, based exclusively on documents, unfolds through the presentation of the two figures, before delving into the two Polar Expeditions: the 1926 journey with the airship Norge and the second in 1928 with the airship Italia. During these, the relationship between the two heroes followed a trajectory that took them from full cooperation in the first expedition, to breaking off relations and ignoring each other for two years, and ultimately toward reconciliation in the tragic course of the second expedition – remembered as the epic of the Red Tent.

But the true aim of the book is to focus on the relationship between Nobile and Amundsen, identifying the real causes that led to their temporary enmity, and then highlighting Amundsen’s sacrifice, as he lost his life in the generous attempt to rescue his “enemy” Nobile, stranded among the polar ice with his companions.

This is the “Great Endeavor” (Grande Impresa), carried out in the skies and on the ice of the North Pole – the place where the lives and dreams of the two heroes intertwined, ultimately shaping the destiny of both.