Well! Life surely is amazing and this crazy little book proves my point. I wrote Too Much Tuscan Sun simply for fun, then I self -published and self-distributed it locally and after the incredible unexpected success was contacted by a real publisher that released it worldwide. To be honest I was not prepared for the big time and finding myself suddenly under the spotlights, was a new experience. The Globe Pequot Press edition can be found on www.amazon.com or if you prefer a personalized autographed home made version simply send me an email. Rasna@dada.it

Dario Castagno

Too Much Tuscan Sun

Confessions of a Chianti Tour Guide

Over the past several years, "the American in Tuscany" has become a literary subgenre. Launched by the phenomenal success of Frances Mayes ´Under the Tuscan Sun´, bookstores now burgeon with nimble, witty accounts of this clash in cultures -young Americans trying to do American things in Italy and bumping against a brick wall of tradition, or the languors of la ´dolce vita´. In the end, all succumb, as they must; and vicariously, their readers succumb as well.

Before this sub-gentre exhausts itself (if it ever will), it´s only fair that we hear the other side of the story: that of a native Tuscan, and of dozens of Americans who have stormed through his life and homeland, determined to find in it whatever they are looking for-whether quaintness or wisdom, submission or direction.

There is no one better to provide this view than Dario Castagno. A Tuscan guide whose client base is predominately American, Dario has spent more than a decade taking individuals and small groups (two to six persons) on customized tours through the Chianti region of Tuscany. Reared in Britain through early childhood, he speaks English fluently and is therefore capable of fully engaging his American clients and getting to know them. Too Much Tuscan Sun (whose title is a nod to Ms. Mayes) is Dario´s account of some of his more remarkable customers-from the obsessive and the oblivious to the downright lunatic.

It is also a primer on Tuscany, its charms, and its culture. Structured around a typical Tuscan year, Dario takes us through the sights, smells and sounds of Chianti during each of the twelve months including the festivities and pageantry that accord with the season (most notably, the Palio-the bareback horse race which consumes the social energies of the people of Siena for all of July and August)

Dario also intersperses an account of his own life and times-that of a transplanted British ˜lording˜ who learns to live the wilds of Chianti; of his discovery and adoption of abandoned peasant farmhouses; of his apprenticeship in the wine industry; and of his arduous transformation from bohemian layabout to thriving Tuscan guide.

But the bulk of this book is devoted to the Americans he 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 on in his nightmares; others-including yours truly-became lifelong friends.

In fact, after Dario has had his say on his American clients, I myself provide a chapter giving the opposite view: What it´s like to sit in the passenger seat of this serene, unflappable Italian´s van and to be escorted into the world he loves so passionately.

Rob Rodi