Raised in the deserts of Africa, this Milanese expedition guide still exhibits the sartorial flair the men of his city are known for.

N’Djamena is a curious capital: wide, dusty boulevards from Chad’s days as a French colony, studded with brutal concrete mosques that overlook Chad’s neighbour, Cameroon, on the other side of the Chari River. There are few cars but a busy airport – largely because of military activity, which has stepped up in recent months with the push against Boko Haram around Lake Chad on the country’s southwest border. On paper, it doesn’t look good. The country is hemmed in by troublemakers including Nigeria, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Libya and Sudan, which also makes landlocked Chad a significant regional crossroads. Hence the peculiar mix of people who gather at the best bar in town, the Kempinski Hotel N’Djamena, where I first meet Mr Rocco Rava, 41 – an Italian-born nomad brought up in the desert, his childhood spread across the entire Sahara, from Mauritania to Algeria.

In person, he is raffish: sun-scored skin, eyes creased by the harsh desert winds, with hair bleached out by the relentless Sahel heat and red sneakers. This is a man who may have spent his life in the Sahara guiding and climbing, but retains an innate sense of style. “My parents were from typical bourgeois Milanese families, but my father, who was also a mountain guide in the Dolomites and Patagonia, had a tendency to be a little different,” he says. Like father, like son. Mr Rava seems to be a man of this world – the desert rat who hasn’t ever quite shaken off his Italian roots.

In 1973, Mr Rava’s father, Piero, took a job as a doctor in Kenya. A year later, he drove with his young wife and one-year-old son from Nairobi back to Genoa, traversing Uganda, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Algeria and Tunisia. “By the time they got back to Italy, they didn’t fit in any more. They wanted to follow their dream of travelling,” says Mr Rava. “My parents sold everything – including my grandmother’s fur coats. They bought two Land Rovers, and took me to Africa, with my father leading his first tourist expedition, in Algeria, in December 1977. There was no sense of danger then. We travelled without Sat phones, or GPS. My father communicated with my family in Italy by sending radio cassettes back with tourists.”

This was how he lived – his father leading trips, under the name of his company, Spazi d’Avventura, which Mr Rava still manages. As a six-year-old boy he rode camels with the Tuareg people of the Sahara, with a turban tying him to the animal so he wouldn’t fall off. “We never had a home. Back then we used a gas station in Mauritania as our base. We slept on the roof of the car. It was paradise,” says Mr Rava. “I felt I was living the life of Tarzan.” As to schooling, it was mostly done by his mother. “I remember she set up this little table and stool in the desert. She wanted me to do some homework. I was concentrating so hard, but the only thing I could say, was ‘In the desert I have fun’.” Mr Rava now has two children of his own, who live in Italy, where he spends four months of the year. “Their life is very different. When their teachers ask where their father is, they say, ‘He is in the desert having fun’. The phrase has never left me. The dunes were my playground, where there was only one rule: I wasn’t allowed to break up the crests until the tourists had been so their photographs looked pristine.”

By 15, Mr Rava was driving support vehicles, with his father guiding, along the African Taghlamt, or “salt route”, heading from Agadez to Fachi and Bilma in Niger, across the Ténéré desert. By 18, he was guiding groups alone. “From 1983 to 1991 was perhaps my happiest time. For my father, business was good. I felt at home. We were making great adventures together, leading significant expeditions.” They included trips with the greatest Saharan explorer of the 20th century, Frenchman Mr Théodore Monod. “For a boy, brought up in the Sahara, it was the equivalent of playing football with Maradona. Monod was special; an extraordinary man, who helped and influenced me. He could walk 50km in a day, surviving on just three espresso cups of water.”

In 1998, desert skills like this also saved Mr Rava’s life. It was in Tibesti in Chad, where Mr Rava was leading a group of French tourists. When they came down the other side of Emi Koussi, the Sahara’s highest mountain, the group was ambushed by six armed rebels. The vehicles sent to meet the climbers had their tyres slashed. Two Frenchmen were taken as hostages, but Mr Rava, who communicated through his local guide, negotiated with the rebels.

“I told the rebel leader that I was the leader of my group. He could take me, but only me,” recalls Mr Rava. “I knew I could manage the situation alone.” I ask why he offered himself up. “A sense of responsibility,” says Mr Rava, “but also, if I’m honest, curiosity about where this might lead. I knew I had this ace up my sleeve: they thought they were kidnapping a white man who knew nothing about their way of life.”

For an entire night, the rebels walked in silence, without sharing water with their hostage. Eventually, one of the rebels, who spoke French, asked: “What is it with you? You walk fast, you don’t complain.” “I answered in their language,” says Mr Rava. “We got along. When we got to the riverbed, where I lived with them in a cave for the next 10 days, we talked and talked.”

At 5am on the 11th day, Mr Rava was released by military intervention. Chadian forces, alerted by the released climbers, had followed various marks Mr Rava had left on the desert floor, from footprints off the beaten track to cigarette butts. In the ensuing firefight, the rebel leader got away. Another of Mr Rava’s kidnappers was injured. “But before he died, he burnt his grigri [a lucky amulet], which was wrapped in a cloth. I will never forget it,” says Mr Rava. “I was trying to give him water.”

I ask if he was scared. “Only when the shooting started,” he says.

I wonder if it was a case of Stockholm syndrome. “I have seen one of my kidnappers since – many years later, he was walking down the street. We had tea together.” As for safety, I ask if he feels unsafe. Mr Rava explains how security in the Sahara is constantly changing – how it started with the first Gulf War of 1990, how the end of Gaddafi’s regime destabilised the entire region, and though he considers Chad safe, how other parts of the Sahara have been infiltrated by Jihadists. He also pulls out a necklace made from two Kalashnikov bullets, which was given to him by Tanko, his closest friend, after his kidnapping. “This will keep me safe,” says Mr Rava. “I will never leave this desert. There is a string that connects me to this place, and its people, which transcends time and space.”

Mr Rava’s guiding and expeditionary services in the Sahara as well as Greenland, Argentina and Mongolia, can be booked through spazidavventura.com.