In recent days one of the pioneering Italian doctors in Kenya, Adriano Landra, left us.
A native of Valle d'Aosta, like many who arrived in Kenya through the Consolata Fathers of Turin to organize the operating room of a hospital at the foot of Mount Kenya, for him a lover of mountains and mountaineering, there was no better place.

Landra, who passed away peacefully at the age of 98, was one of the first to engage in plastic surgery in the country on its way to independence. It was he directly, in a very pleasant interview a few years ago for the book "Portraits of Italians in Kenya," who told me his story.
"Shortly after I had arrived in Kenya, the country plunged into the Mau Mau revolt, , so I decided to take my residency in Cape Town, from 1955 to 1957. When I returned to Nairobi, the brand new Aga Khan Hospital was looking for a doctor with my qualities, and I did not hesitate to accept."

And among the wards of the capital's hospital, Landra also found love, a French girl whose family had fled the revolting Congo. She had come to visit a hospitalized friend. The doctor's relentless blue eyes bewitched her. "It was love at first sight," Landra admitted.
Since then, her life has been divided between her, the operating room and the Kenyan peaks.
"I remember almost every operation I performed and I kept count," she told me, "it's 13,740, write it down!

Landra was the first Italian to climb Mount Kenya since the legendary ascent of Benuzzi and Balletto, the Italian prisoners who escaped from a British detention camp and did the feat, planting the tricolor and then returning to captivity.
"On reaching Point Lenana," Landra told me, "I found planted in the rock the crampons used by the two prisoners. I recognized them because they had been made from tuna and sardine cans, as they had told me. Further on there was also a piece of rope. They are among the most cherished heirlooms I keep."

Landra over the years would also climb Kilimanjaro and Ruwenzori, until he fulfilled his great dream of an expedition to the Himalayas.
Between professional assignments in Indonesia and the Middle East, assignments in London and upgrades at Oxford, Landra always returned to Kenya, working well into his nineties and leaving the pickaxe in the garden only a few years earlier.
"My life was always a vacation, because I loved my work and the things I did," he admitted. Italians of a time, and of an Africa, that was.
Kwaheri, Dr. Landra!