Author Name: Sandro Martini
Book Title: Ciao, Amore, Ciao
Series: Alex Lago Book #1
Publication Date: March 26, 2025
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Pages: 426 (kindle); 385 (paperback)
Genre: Historical Fiction
Any Triggers: War
Twitter Handle: @MartiniAlex @cathiedunn @marylschmidt
Instagram Handle: @lxmartini @thecoffeepotbookclub
Hashtags: #CiaoAmoreCiao #HistoricalFiction #WWII #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub
Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/07/blog-tour-ciao-amore-ciao-by-sandro-martini.html
Book Title and Author Name:
Ciao, Amore, Ciao
Sandro Martini
Blurb:
An enthralling dual-timeline WWII family mystery, based on the heartbreaking true story of the massacre in a small town in Italy in July of 1945, from award-winning, bestselling novelist Sandro Martini.
“A gripping saga that roots excruciating betrayals in a nation’s tragic history.” –Kirkus Reviews
In the winter of 1942, an Italian army of young men vanishes in the icefields of the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1945, a massacre in Schio, northeastern Italy, where families grieve the dead, makes international headlines.
In present-day Veneto, an ordinary man is about to stumble onto a horrifying secret.
Alex Lago is a jaded journalist whose career is fading as fast as his marriage. When he discovers an aged World War II photo in his dying father’s home, and innocently posts it to a Facebook group, he gets an urgent message: Take it down. NOW.
Alex finds himself digging into a past that needs to stay hidden. What he’s about to uncover is a secret that can topple a political dynasty buried under seventy years of rubble. Suddenly entangled in a deadly legacy, he encounters the one person who can offer him redemption, for an unimaginable price.
Told from three alternating points of view, Martini’s World War II tale of intrigue, war, and heartbreak pulls the Iron Curtain back to reveal a country nursing its wounds after horrific defeat, an army of boys forever frozen at the gates of Stalingrad, British spies scheming to reshape Italy’s future, and the stinging unsolved murder of a partisan hero.
Ciao, Amore, Ciao is a gripping story of the most heroic, untold battle of the Second World War, and a brilliantly woven novel that brings the deceits of the past and the reckoning of the present together.
“Balances action, suspense, and emotional depth to deliver a truly immersive, thought-provoking read with an unflinching look at the sins of the past and the lengths to which the powerful will go to keep them buried.” ~ Sublime Book Review
EXCERPT 2:
We order two cappuccinos outside the Bounty Bar and sit on cold wicker chairs. No blankets here—this isn’t Zürich, even if there’s a resemblance. It’s cold in the shadows of those brutalist palazzi that surround us, but we can smoke out here on the sidewalk under the apartment buildings that swallow the warmth, all those lives behind the yellow-lit windows.
“That was quite a coincidence,” she says. “Right?”
“No,” I reply, “it seriously was.” I watch the waitress place two capuccios on the table. I do up the top button of my coat, raise my collar and sink into its warmth. She looks at me with those eyes of hers and I ask, “Why were you there?”
“Where?”
“At—” I sip my cappuccino and watch my breath turn to mist. “We playing games again?”
“You first.”
“I don’t think I need to explain.”
She looks down at her steaming cappuccino. “I’m sorry,” she says.
I shrug. But I don’t trust myself to speak. Not for a long while. “Your turn.”
Cigarette between her fingers and a thumbnail between her teeth, she gazes at me as if searching for something that I know she’ll never find. It’s a strange sensation, to be seen. Then she crushes the cigarette into the ashtray, and I watch the smoke rise nervously into the cold. “Do you believe in destiny?” she asks me.
“Maybe, yes,” I tell her. “Maybe now more than ever.”
“Why?”
“Because I need it to make sense,” I reply before I can self-censor and glance down at the ring on her finger. “You’re married.”
“Yes,” she glances down at her wedding band and then my naked fingers. “Happily married. You?”
“Married,” I reply, but my mind is distracted by a thought that has just occurred to me. I’m about to ask when she says, “Come. Let’s take a walk,” and standing, she slips a five euro note under the ashtray and leads me up toward the Duomo casting its pompous shadow over the ornate Piazza Rossi. She turns left, down the hill past the Benetton store and the Palladio- designed façade of the Palazzo Schio. The shadows here, between the buildings, are dense, and the cold penetrates my coat.
“I was hoping you’d call,” I tell her.
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“I was going to send you a message tomorrow, actually.”
“Really?”
“Really, yes.”
“About?”
“The confession.”
“Yours?”
She smiles. I can almost picture my father as a young man walking these streets. He was born in the house down there on the left, just past the Due Spade. Nothing has changed much since back then; even the house, he’d told me once, still has the same front door. “Il freddo,” my father would say, as if it were a monster, “the cold, Sandro, always the cold.” Just there by the Due Spade, he told me, before the Nazis had left that April morning in 1945, he’d come across a dead German soldier in an alley with a set of binoculars around his neck and he’d had the desire to steal them.
I can’t understand why he’d come back here.
Sofia slows in front of a tiny piazza laid-out before a red stucco building. “The library,” she says. “This is where it happened.”
It takes me a moment. “Wait, this was—this was the jail?”
“Once a hospital, then a jail, and now a library,” she says. “Life compressed, no?”
There’s a tree that stands sentry before the building, a lone tree that rises in a stump from a vague round hole cut into the cobbles of the piazzetta. Circling the tree are two concentric, curved metal benches aiming at one another but never quite meeting. The tree stands fragile and cold, custodian to voices that have shared forgotten secrets on those benches, but I suspect that’s not our destiny, Sofia’s and mine.
“Come on.” Sofia leads me through a narrow door and into the yellow-lit library and down a long hallway flanked on one side by broad windows beyond which is a murky courtyard. I think of my father in Malo. I should be with him now, not here, not doing this. Whatever this is.
“Here and upstairs,” she says, “is where the shooting happened. Offices now.” There’s a reading room to our right, and behind the long communal tables, kids flick through pages under lights invisible in the sun, and people shuffle about in the silence of heavy carpets. There’s no link with this place and the past. It’s just bricks. And a place where things have always come to die—people first and now their words. History is memory and objects deflect memory. Who’d told me that?
Buy Link:
Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/4A6R10
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
Author Bio:
Sandro Martini has worked as a word monkey on three continents. He’s the author of Tracks: Racing the Sun, an award-winning historical novel.
Sandro grew up in Africa to immigrant parents, studied law in Italy, chased literary dreams in London, hustled American dollars in New York City, and is now hiding out in Switzerland, where he moonlights as a Comms guy and tries hard not to speak German.
You can find him either uber-driving his daughter, chasing faster cars on the autobahn, or swimming in Lake Zurich with a cockapoo named Tintin.
His latest historical suspense novel, Ciao, Amore, Ciao, is now available.
Author Links:
Website: https://www.sandro-martini-writes.com/
Twitter / X: https://x.com/MartiniAlex
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SandroMartiniWrites/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lxmartini/
Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/sandro-martini
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/SANDRO-MARTINI/author/B00JOBZR2C
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/55190776.Sandro_Martini
When Angels Fly 