Books By Dario Castagno
New York Times’ Best Selling Author
During the course of Covid19’s lockdown, Dario Castagno haphazardly opens an antique trunk that had once belonged to a great aunt. As he spends his solitary days going through the content of portraits and documents, it transpires a captivating microcosm of the author’s surprising Waldensian heritage. By turns celebratory and revelatory, the book is a bittersweet excursus through Dario’s striking lineage and an uncanny alpine populace’s history that endured pogroms and unspeakable prejudices for centuries.
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Dario returns to his primo amore relating accounts of some of his more remarkable clients he accompanied on his tours, from the obsessive and the oblivious to the downright lunatic. Each chapter interspersed by a sundry of deeper celebratory and memorable encounters, and that leads to quite the chilling epilogue.
This bittersweet milestone prompts a recollection of how he first became a Tuscan tour guide (a career he essentially invented), and leaves him wondering what the next chapter of his life might entail.
The newly graduated Dario fulfills the remainder of his duty as an actual firefighter in his home city of Siena, where his colleagues include not only other youths fulfilling their naja, but career firefighters well into middle age, not all of whom get along famously with the rebellious, free-thinking Dario.
The bulk of the book is devoted, with humor and affection, to the Americans Dario has met – the vain, the silly, the ignorant, the ambitious, the horny, the condescending, the charming, and the outright pathological. Some of them have made his life hell and live in his nightmares; others became lifelong friends.
A charming, heartfelt, and often humorous insider’s view of the Tuscan people, culture, and landscape.
Dario decants another spellbinding volume about life in a place where the everyday can still be infused with magic and marvel.
“Ultimo is Chianti.” The truth of these words-and the century-long existence of Ultimo Gori is the essence of Dario Castagno’s fourth book.
A coffee table book beautifully showing a local, if vanishing, tradition and to document the attendant virtues of my beloved hills in Chianti District Nine.
For his second novel, Dario Castagno returns to the enchanted landscape of An Osteria In Chianti (and of his celebrated memoirs): the fabled Tuscan countryside.
The Bromide In the Soup alternates between an autobiographical account of his his obligatory service in the Roman firefighting academy during his teens, and vividly imagined histories of the various young men who trained alongside him.
Available now for instant purchase, or download from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Available now for instant purchase, or download from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Available now for instant purchase, or download from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.