author

Giovanni Battista Cerruti

1850–1914

Drawn to distant horizons and hard-to-reach places, this Italian explorer turned his years in Southeast Asia into vivid travel writing. His best-known book, My Friends the Savages, mixes adventure, observation, and a strong personal fascination with life beyond the comforts of Europe.

1 Audiobook

My Friends the Savages

My Friends the Savages

by Giovanni Battista Cerruti

About the author

Born in Varazze on November 28, 1850, Giovanni Battista Cerruti was an Italian explorer and traveler. Sources describe him going to sea while still very young, first sailing as a cabin boy and later traveling widely through the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia before settling for periods in places such as Singapore, Jakarta, and Penang.

Cerruti is remembered above all for My Friends the Savages: Notes and Observations of a Perak Settler, published in 1908 and later translated into English. In it, he writes about his experiences in the Malay Peninsula and about the Sakai peoples, blending firsthand adventure with the attitudes and curiosities of an early-20th-century explorer.

He died in Penang on June 28, 1914. A clear, verifiable portrait image was not available from the sources I could confirm here, so no profile image is included.