From Piero

Who apparently knows everything, writes brilliantly and chimes in at least once a day to tell me I'm an idiot:

He writes:

For once, you are not wrong. Just a bit inaccurate - as with some of the cheese stories, on which I have been commenting. But then again, it is the local informers' fault.

Amba Aradam is the name of a massif in Ethiopia, in the Tigray region, near the border with Eritrea. Not too far from that area, a battle took place in 1896 at Adua (Italian spelling) or Adowa (English spelling), which was a dramatic defeat for the Italian colonial troops and their Eritrean-Somalis auxiliaries (Ascari). Vastly over-numbered by the Ethiopian forces (about 100,000 vs. 17,500) and poorly led, the Italians had in a single day almost 6,000 fatalities.

One should not think of the Ethiopian forces of those days as a rag tag band of warriors. They were mostly armed with modern rifles (interestingly, the poet Arthur Rimbaud was one of the leading smugglers of European weaponry in East Africa in those days), had some French built artillery, and were assisted by French and Russian military advisors (in the Cold War of the late 19th century, Italy was an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and therefore an enemy of the Franco-Russain entente). The Ethiopians losses were even higher - an estimated 11,000 - but Adowa was in any case a resounding victory for the last independent African power.

However, the name Amba Aradan - and the subsequent expression "ambaradan", which in Northern Italian dialects is used exactly the way you write, and from which the band gets its name - has to do with an Italian victory, gained in 1935 over the Ethiopian Army, in the early phases of the war which led to the short lived Italian domination of Ethiopia. So the mess, havoc, etc. were not those produced on the Italians, but rather by the Italians on the poor Ethiopians. It is not a victory to be proud of - a technologically more advanced power beating a (by then) backward armed force, tanks and planes against infantry and cavalry - so I am very glad of the fact that most Italians will in fact associate the Ambaradan expression with a distant memory of defeat. One of the redeeming features of this country is its lack of chauvinism, which sometimes become an ironic form of self-deprecation. Defeats and failures become national symbols more easily than victories - even to the extent of forgetting actual military history.

By Dan Steinberg |  February 22, 2006; 5:30 PM ET
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