TOM ISITT
Author, historian, adventurer

Me, my books, and assorted non-specific things

The Idea

The Italian Front is a neglected part of WW1 history, and is so extraordinary that it deserves far more attention. From the malarial marshes of the Adriatic to the ice-capped peaks of the Alps, men fought each other, and the weather, in the most extreme environments imaginable.

The Trips

My travels have taken me to the Italian Front more than a dozen times, during which time I've cycled and hiked more than 1,200 miles, and ascended (under my own steam) more than 210,000ft. I've been caving hundreds of feet beneath the Kras, and climbed to 11,300ft on the Ortler, in an attempt to experience something of what those men went through 100 years ago.

 The Book

To be published by Helion & Co on November 15, 2025, Thunder in The Mountains is a fresh look at WW1 on the Italian Front, meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated.

THUNDER IN THE MOUNTAINS

  • It's history.
  • It’s travel.
  • It’s remembrance.
  • It’s adventure.
  • It’s triumph (and failure) in the face of seemingly impossible adversity.
  • It’s ordinary people doing extraordinary things in incredible places.
  • It’s military history presented in an entirely new way.


It’s Thunder in The Mountains, by Tom Isitt, published by Helion & Co on November 15th, 2025.


336 pages, full colour throughout

140,000 words

149 photos (61 archive, 88 modern)

26 colour maps

 

Plus...

 

QR codes in each chapter link to free additional content — more photos, more maps, videos, animated battle maps, and 27 downloadable battlefield walks.


Part history, part travelogue, part battlefield guide, Thunder in The Mountains takes a fresh look at WW1 on the Italian Front in a meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated new book. For so long neglected by British historians, the Italian Front was WW1 fought at the limits of human endurance, from the malarial marshes of the Adriatic to ice-clad peaks of the Ortler Alps. A common misconception is that the Italian Front was an irrelevant side-show, but Thunder in The Mountains shows that it played an essential part in the Allied victory, at a cost of one million lives.

 

Tom Isitt has spent the last six years exploring the Italian Front of WW1 on foot, by bicycle, and even on horseback, giving him a unique insight into the extraordinary battles that took place amongst the peaks and valleys of the Alpine front.

 

He walked in the footsteps of his Grandfather, who served with the British 48th Division in Italy, and tells the story of WW1 fought in very different circumstances to the wet plains of the Western Front, or the icy steppes of the Eastern Front. Here military advances were often measured in vertical metres, attack tunnels were dug through solid ice at 11,000 ft above sea level, the tops of mountains were blown off with huge mines, and thousands of soldiers perished in avalanches.

Pre-Order

Riding in The Zone Rouge

Published in 2019 to high critical acclaim, and shortlisted for the Sports Book of The Year, Riding in The Zone Rouge is a book about a long-forgotten bicycle race across the battlefields of the Western Front in April 1919.

In appalling, freezing weather the 87 riders rode 2,000km across the brutalised roads of Belgium and northern France barely six months after the end of WW1. Each day's stage was around 300km in length and took at least 14 hours of hard physical effort on terrible roads. Many of the riders had fought on the battlefields they traversed, and the race was so hard that only 21 riders finished race,

Although nominally about a bicycle race, this is really a tale of endurance and the indomitable human spirit.
Buy it Now

Coming soon(ish)

Exodus - The Great Retreat of 1915

In October 1915 the Austro-German invasion of Serbia resulted in around 400,000 Serb civilians and soldiers (and a few hundred British naval servicemen, doctors, and nurses) retreating across the Albanian Alps in mid-winter. En route across the high snowy mountains, pursued by the enemy and attacked by hostile locals, around 237,000 of them died from violence, cold and starvation. It was known to the Serbs as the Golgotha.


I want to tell the stories of eight people who took part in this cataclysmic event, interweaving their stories as they fought for survival in appalling conditions. They are boy soldiers, nurses, women doctors, British sailors, and even a British nurse-turned-soldier who fought in rearguard actions as a Sergeant in the Serbian army. They were extraordinary women engaged in an extraordinary struggle, and yet very little has been qwritten about them.


I will soon be looking for a publisher, so please get in touch if you too think this will be a best-seller.


tom@isitt.org.uk