Novelist trained as chef in San Pellegrino Terme

Novelist Sandrone Dazieri attended a
catering college in San Pellegrino Terme

Sandrone Dazieri, the best-selling author who celebrates his 53^rd birthday today, has a connection with the Bergamo area.

Before fulfilling his ambition to write fiction – he is the author of more than 12 crime thrillers – Dazieri spent 10 years working as a chef, having trained in San Pellegrino Terme.

The town in Val Brembana has long tradition of educating chefs and hotel management staff, being home to a vocational institute for hotelier and catering services.

Born in Cremona, Dazieri worked in locations all over Italy as he pursued his career in cooking, but as an enthusiastic reader of gialli – the word Italians use to describe crime novels on account of their traditional yellow covers – he had ambitions to write and eventually decided to move to Milan in the hope of finding work in the publishing business or journalism.

After working as a proofreader and writing about his favourite genre fiction for the newspaper Il Manifesto, he had his first success as a novelist with Attenti al Gorilla – Beware of the Gorilla – which introduced readers to a complex character, based on himself and even named Sandrone, with two personalities who solves crimes and tackles injustices.

The book spawned a series featuring the same character that not only gained Dazieri enormous popularity among Italian readers but helped him get work as a screenwriter, especially in the area of TV crime dramas.

He was for several years a contributing writer to the hugely popular Canale 5 series Squadra Antimafia.

Now, for the first time, Dazieri has moved into the English language market with Kill the Father, published by Simon & Schuster in London in January 2017.

Already a top-selling title in Italy, the dark crime thriller received such good reviews in the literary sections of English newspapers and magazines that it made the Sunday Times best-sellers list.

The novel features new characters in Colomba Caselli, the chief of the Rome police’s major crimes unit, and Dante Torre, a man who spent 10 years of his childhood imprisoned by a masked kidnapper and is called in to help Caselli solve a crime with all the hallmarks of the one committed by his own captor.

A second in a planned series featuring the same lead characters, entitled Kill the Angel, is due to be published in English next year.

San Pellegrino Terme is well known as the home of the mineral waters bearing the name of the town.

It was a fashionable spa town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a favourite haunt with wealthy industrialists from Bergamo.  Some wonderful Liberty-style architecture remains as a legacy, in the shape of the San Pellegrino Thermal Baths, the Municipal Casino and the Grand Hotel.

The Grand Hotel in San Pellegrino Terme opened in
1904 with 250 luxury guest rooms

The resort’s popularity declined somewhat in the mid-20th century.  The Grand Hotel, an extraordinary building of 162 metres (177 yards) in length on the left bank of the Bremba river, rises to seven storeys high and has 250 guest rooms.

Designed by Milanese architect Romolo Squadrelli and opened in 1904, it once boasted a guest register – now preserved in a San Pellegrino library – that included such names as Queen Margherita of Savoy and other members of the Italian royal family, the composer Pietro Mascagni, General Luigi Cadorna, Nobel Prize winners Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo, relatives of King Faruk of Egypt, the film director Federico Fellini, opera singer Mario del Monaco and players from the ‘Grande Inter’ team that dominated Italian football in the 1960s.

Sadly, as business fell away, the hotel could not maintain the standards of luxury demanded to keep its five-star status and it closed in 1979.  It is such a magnificent building, however, that it is hoped that individuals or organisations will come forward to restore it.

This has already happened, to a degree with the equally impressive Municipal Casino on the opposite bank from the Grand Hotel and also designed by Squadrelli, which has not operated as a gambling establishment since 1946 but which now hosts cultural and theatrical events, as well as meetings, congresses, wedding receptions, social dinners, gala evenings, fashion shows, corporate conventions and exhibitions.

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