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Honesty in Writing
Ciao, Amore, Ciao follows a jaded journalist whose career is fading fast, who discovers an old WWII photo in his dying father’s home, and after posting it online, he begins to uncover long-buried secrets and a dark legacy that needs to remain hidden. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration was both cathartic—I began the novel a week after my dad passed away, and I hardly even recall writing the first draft—and to tell the story of my family, a family of no ones, and the story of boys whose sacrifices were conveniently forgotten by the very people who sent them to their deaths. I guess you could say the inspiration was personal: a personal account to try and make sense of what happened—to me, to my uncle (who was one of the tens of thousands who vanished into the Russian steppes in 1943), and my dad, who spent a life living with the wounds of that tragedy.
Some events in the book bear chilling similarities to real-life events. Did you take any inspiration from real life when developing this book?
A lot of the novel is based on “true events”, including many of the scenes with the narrator watching his dad’s slow passing. The war scenes, too, were taken from hundreds of sources and a decade’s worth of research. I tried to meld all those soldiers’ recollections into the novel so that the novel remains true to what those boys suffered in Stalingrad. I think that’s what resonates in the novel, the “truth” of it. When you read those scenes, it’s sobering to remember that hardly any of it came from imagination. They’re just a retelling of stories told by survivors, and diaries and letters from those who, like my uncle, never came home. Not even their bodies, they just vanished into the ice. The tragedy was both what happened to them during those horror-filled days of their retreat, and what happened to the survivors because it was over a decade before any of their recollections were allowed to be published. Not until the mid-’50s did Italy begin to understand the true depth of the disaster. By then, of course, Italy was already in a hurry to move on to a new future, and that entire history was conveniently forgotten by everyone except those who were there, and those families who had to find a way to deal with that unspeakable heartbreak.
What was one of the hardest parts of Ciao, Amore, Ciao for you to write?
Writing about my family and my dad was difficult because the novel could only work if I wrote honestly. And honesty in writing is the most difficult thing of all because there’s no hiding once you choose to go on that path. Reliving the moment when I saw my dad, the night he left, and I had come to the hospital alone to see him there in his bed—that was hard. I edit a lot, that’s part of my process, but for that scene, I wrote it once and never went back to it again. Sometimes, a first take is all it takes, and editing that scene would have been to try and polish a raw emotion. That’s never a good idea because instinct is to try and change things, to make the “hero” a better man or whatever.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
My next novel is Book 2 in Alex Lago’s series, set in South Africa. The “hero” this time around is the legendary South African golfer, Bobby Locke. I know, golf, right? But Locke is a perfect metaphor for the true hero of the book, Johannesburg, in all its tragic, violent colour. Similarly to both my previous novels—Ciao, Amore, Ciao, and Tracks: Racing the Sun—it’s a dual-timeline historical fiction/mystery/autofiction. Yes, maybe one day I’ll find an actual genre! But probably not. My novels are about emotion, and this new one tells the story of a man who spent his life running from them. And what that cost his family was unimaginable. I expect it to be published in 2026, the manuscript is virtually complete.
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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.
Ciao, Amore, Ciao
Sandro Martini’s Ciao, Amore, Ciao is a soul-wrenching blend of memoir and historical fiction that begins with the quiet unraveling of a family and ends with the thunderous echoes of a nation’s buried past. Told through the eyes of a grieving son, the story moves between present-day Italy and fragments of a family’s long-buried secrets, tracing the last days of the narrator’s parents while peeling back layers of memory, guilt, and unresolved trauma. It’s a story of death and love, fathers and sons, and the way history bleeds into the present, whether we ask for it or not.
This book left me aching. Martini’s voice is raw and self-deprecating, not overly polished, which makes it feel incredibly relatable. I loved how he didn’t try to wrap up his grief in a neat little bow. Instead, he let it run wild through the streets of Piovene, scream through the halls of a hospital, and settle into the quiet spaces of a father’s old car. And the prose is beautiful. Sharp and vivid, like a Polaroid that won’t stop developing. There were passages where I had to stop and breathe, not because they were hard to understand, but because they were so true.
The ideas in this book haunted me. Martini doesn’t just write about family loss; he goes after the rot that lies underneath nations and legacies. There’s bitterness here—about fascism, about immigration, about how Italy remembers and forgets its sons. But there’s also a weird kind of love buried in all that anger. The kind of love that’s too painful to talk about directly, so it comes out sideways, in jokes and cigarette smoke and rusting old cars.
I’d recommend Ciao, Amore, Ciao to anyone who’s lost a parent, anyone who’s tried to understand their family too late, or anyone who thinks history lives only in textbooks. This book is messy, emotional, and full of ghosts. But it’s also deeply honest and strangely comforting, like a long night drive with someone who knows when not to talk. I wouldn’t say it’s easy reading, but if you let it, it’ll stay with you long after the last page.
Pages: 426 | ASIN : B0DXLC2LJC
LITERARY TITAN 