Today, I’m delighted to host Sandro Martini for the blog tour for Ciao, Amore, Ciao, book one in the Alex Lago Series. Sandro has kindly provided an excerpt for you to enjoy (see below).
You can follow the full tour here:
https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/07/blog-tour-ciao-amore-ciao-by-sandro-martini.html
Ciao, Amore, Ciao by 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
Buy Link:
Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/4A6R10
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
Excerpt from Ciao, Amore, Ciao
On the wall above the bed hangs a crucifix. A relic of childhood. Mine.
I was in a hospital, in my oxygen tent, and my mom had called for a priest. Who knows where she’d found him because she always hated priests, but he’d come and stood over my bed like a vulture and said his prayers and left the crucifix behind, a talisman, I suppose, and I guess it worked because I didn’t die. But then these are my half-memories, and my mom, who would remember it all, is gone. And with her my childhood, my life before my own recollections, and maybe it’s best that it’s all gone, this yellow-tinged resin of memory of my mom taking me to a specialist and me asking to be carried in her arms, and I remember the world up there, safe in her arms, up there where the grown-ups spoke and rationalised, up there where the magic that kept me alive happened, the two vials she kept in the refrigerator now in her denim shoulder bag for the specialist to inject into my blood. Tetracycline.
And then we’d get the bus back home, me lying with my head on her lap feeling the grumble of the bus beneath the hot, clinging plastic seat, and the abstracted stroke of her fingers through my hair as the purple jacaranda trees pulsed-on by. Shadow-and-light, shadow-and-light, down into Yeoville and the promise of another afternoon without the taste of honey-wet phlegm closing down my lungs, and a radio play on Springbok Radio floating in the light of my room with those voices from far-away lands as beautiful as the fancy of a sick boy in Africa who had nothing much left but his dreams. She died and took my history with her, my mom who’d come to Africa, pregnant with my brother on that flight from Rome, a twenty-two-hour ordeal down the spine of Africa where kids would come onto the plane at each stop baring exotic foods secreted in flies before finally meeting my dad in Joburg carrying, she once told me, seven red carnations, not a word of English between them, and somehow she’d given birth to a child three months later in a hospital where the only common word between her and the doctor and the nurse was spaghetti.
“I just looked at the doctor’s face,” my mom would say. “Words don’t matter that much in the end.”
My brother. Focus, I think, licking the tears on my lips, focus on the task.
I’d removed my mom’s stuff after she died, stored them downstairs in suitcases in the garage while my dad sat on the couch in the lounge. A lifetime of work and sacrifice and all that remains now is my father’s stuff. Not much of that, either. The old shed possessions like they do dreams.
I step to the drawer and find an old shoebox from a department store in Joburg that’d gone bust back in the late-’80s. Inside are all his personal papers. Well organised. There’s a plastic pouch with all his work papers from Brazil in the ’50s, Paris and Zürich and Torino, and his original papers from Mozambique, Zambia, Rhodesia, and South Africa, where he’d arrived in the winter of 1960. Another pouch contains the rest of his papers. Bank statements, all tidily marked, and the document my brother is asking for.
I slide it out of the pouch.
Last Will & Testament.
Something slips out from the pouch and floats to the floor like tickertape. A photograph. I scoop it up. Monochrome. My father is of that generation who marked up photos on the back, but the handwriting here isn’t his.
July 1943. I leave this with you. You’ll know what to do if the time comes. And what not to do. Yours in friendship—JC.
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
Pam Lecky Books 
Leave a comment