Tobias Jones – författare

An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy.When Tobias Jones first travelled to Italy, he expected to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he discovered a very different country, besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment.Now, in this fascinating travelogue, Jones explores not just Italy's familiar delights (art, climate, cuisine), but the livelier and stranger sides of the bel paese: language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a 'brothel'? And why do people warn him that 'Clean Hands' only disguise 'Dirty Feet'?

Winner of the Daily Telegraph Football Book of the Year Ultras are often compared to punks, Hell's Angels, hooligans or the South American Barras Bravas. But in truth, they are a thoroughly Italian phenomenon... From the author of The Dark Heart of Italy, Blood on the Altar and A Place of Refuge. Italy's ultras are the most organised and violent fans in European football. Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hell's Angels and hooligans, they're often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right. But the purist ultras say that they are are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport. They champion not just their teams, they say, but their forgotten suburbs and the dispossessed. Through the prism of the ultras, Jones crafts a compelling investigation into Italian society and its favourite sport. He writes about not just the ultras of some of Italy's biggest clubs – Juventus, Torino, Lazio, Roma and Genoa – but also about its lesser-known ones from Cosenza and Catania. He examines the sinister side of football fandom, with its violence and political extremism, but also admires the passion, wit, solidarity and style of a fascinating and contradictory subculture.

Utopian Dreams offers one writer's attempt to retreat from the 'real world' - which is making him emptier and angrier by the day - and seek out the alternatives to modern manners and morality. Instead of cynicism, loneliness and depression, is it possible to be idealistic, to find belonging and companionship with others who share your sadness, or even, perhaps, your happiness? With his wife and baby in tow, Jones spends a year with spritualists, time-travellers, reformed drug addicts and Quakers, producing a fascinating exploration of the meaning of community.

An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy.In 1999 Tobias Jones travelled to Italy, expecting to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he discovered a very different country, besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment.Now, in this fascinating travelogue, Jones explores not just Italy's familiar delights (art, climate, cuisine), but the livelier and stranger sides of the bel paese: language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a 'brothel'? And why do people warn him that 'Clean Hands' only disguise 'Dirty Feet'?

Castagnetti (informally known as 'Casta') is a private detective who doesn't do things by the book. He's dogged and lonely, impatient with the world of appearances and deceit. So when a pompous notary commissions him to verify that a missing person is "presumed dead" in order to dispose of a dead woman's estate to the other heirs, Casta smells a rat. Before long he's reopening wounds from years ago and exposing family secrets to those who have tried to suppress them.The relatives of Signora Salati just want their their inheritance, but Casta is going to make sure they get their just desserts as well. Because Casta isn't the sort to content himself with "presumed dead". He likes certainty, the kind of certainty that comes from seeing a skeleton. As the Salati case progresses, other corpses appear and Casta realises he's at the centre of an old-fashioned Italian whodunit.The Salti Case marks the appearance of a new and memorable detective: an orphan who has pulled himself up from the mean streets.

A beautiful teenage girl, Simona Biondi, has gone missing from her home in the Italian capital. Castagnetti, the private detective hired by her parents, trawls the streets of Rome, finding himself drawn into the dark, erotic world of a TV empire belonging to a media mogul turned politician called Mario Di Angelo.He unearths a murky world in which nubile young women, desperate for stardom, are prepared to do anything to get a break; in which powerful men are happy to exploit that desperation in order to make money and make love. Castagnetti discovers that Anna Sartori, a young woman on the fringes of the Di Angelo empire, went missing almost twenty years ago. Anna Sartori's best friend, he finds out, was Simona's sister. This is a world, Castagnetti realises, where secrets are like fireworks: you don't see them until they explode.

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years went by and Elisa's family could find only false leads.2002, and Restivo is now living in Bournemouth. In November that year, his neighbour is found murdered, with strands of her own hair in her hands. Once again the police are at a loss to pin anything on him. It's not until 2010, when Elisa's decomposed body is found in the church where she went missing, that the two cases are linked and Restivo is finally dealt with. Blood on the Altar combines a gripping true crime case with Jones's deep understanding of Italian culture - the impunity it offers to the powerful - he so expertly demonstrated in his bestseller: The Dark Heart of Italy.

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years went by and Elisa's family could find only false leads.2002, and Restivo is now living in Bournemouth. In November that year, his neighbour is found murdered, with strands of her own hair in her hands. Once again the police are at a loss to pin anything on him. It's not until 2010, when Elisa's decomposed body is found in the church where she went missing, that the two cases are linked and Restivo is finally dealt with. Blood on the Altar combines a gripping true crime case with Jones's deep understanding of Italian culture - the impunity it offers to the powerful - he so expertly demonstrated in his bestseller: The Dark Heart of Italy.

Castagnetti, a bee-keeping private detective, is hired by a businessman to find out who set fire to his car and why. It seems like a dead-end case, nothing more than an instance of mindless vandalism. But before long the businessman is receiving threatening phone calls, his factory is burnt to the ground and an employee loses his life.Castagnetti traces similar cases of arson across the city and realises that this sort of systematic intimidation happens when the owner's land is about to be redesignated as residential. The last person to stand in the developers' way was whacked in Milan a year ago. Castagnetti needs to solve the case before his client, and his city, are both buried in cement.

Utopian Dreams offers one writer's attempt to retreat from the 'real world' - which is making him emptier and angrier by the day - and seek out the alternatives to modern manners and morality. Instead of cynicism, loneliness and depression, is it possible to be idealistic, to find belonging and companionship with others who share your sadness, or even, perhaps, your happiness? With his wife and baby in tow, Jones spends a year with spritualists, time-travellers, reformed drug addicts and Quakers, producing a fascinating exploration of the meaning of community.

Winner of the Daily Telegraph Football Book of the Year Ultras are often compared to punks, Hell''s Angels, hooligans or the South American Barras Bravas. But in truth, they are a thoroughly Italian phenomenon... From the author of The Dark Heart of Italy, Blood on the Altar and A Place of Refuge. Italy''s ultras are the most organised and violent fans in European football. Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hell''s Angels and hooligans, they''re often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right. But the purist ultras say that they are are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport. They champion not just their teams, they say, but their forgotten suburbs and the dispossessed. Through the prism of the ultras, Jones crafts a compelling investigation into Italian society and its favourite sport. He writes about not just the ultras of some of Italy''s biggest clubs – Juventus, Torino, Lazio, Roma and Genoa – but also about its lesser-known ones from Cosenza and Catania. He examines the sinister side of football fandom, with its violence and political extremism, but also admires the passion, wit, solidarity and style of a fascinating and contradictory subculture.

A captivating journey along the iconic River Po and through Italian history, society and culture. ''Delightful... A wonderful cornucopia of history'' TLS''Uncovers the Po''s fascinating history'' GuardianThe Po is the longest river in Italy, travelling for 652 kilometres from one end of the country to the other. It rises by the French border in the Alps and meanders the width of the entire peninsula to the Adriatic Sea in the east. Flowing next to many of Italy''s most exquisite cities – Ferrara, Mantova, Parma, Cremona, Pavia and Torino – the river is a part of the national psyche, as iconic to Italy as the Thames is to England or the Mississippi to the USA.For millennia, the Po was a vital trading route and a valuable source of tax revenue, fiercely fought over by rival powers. It was also a moat protecting Italy from invaders from the north, from Hannibal to Holy Roman Emperors. But as humans radically altered the river''s hydrology, those floodplains became important places of major industries and agricultures, the source of bricks, timber, silk, hemp, cement, flour and risotto rice.Tobias Jones travels the length of the river against the current, gathering stories of battles, writers, cuisines, entertainers, religious minorities and music. Both an ecological lament and a celebration of the resourcefulness and resilience of the people of the Po, the book opens a window onto a stunning, but now neglected, part of Italy.

A captivating journey along the iconic River Po and through Italian history, society and culture.'Delightful... A wonderful cornucopia of history' TLS'Uncovers the Po's fascinating history' GuardianThe Po is the longest river in Italy, travelling for 652 kilometres from one end of the country to the other. It rises by the French border in the Alps and meanders the width of the entire peninsula to the Adriatic Sea in the east. Flowing next to many of Italy's most exquisite cities – Ferrara, Mantova, Parma, Cremona, Pavia and Torino – the river is a part of the national psyche, as iconic to Italy as the Thames is to England or the Mississippi to the USA.For millennia, the Po was a vital trading route and a valuable source of tax revenue, fiercely fought over by rival powers. It was also a moat protecting Italy from invaders from the north, from Hannibal to Holy Roman Emperors. But as humans radically altered the river's hydrology, those floodplains became important places of major industries and agricultures, the source of bricks, timber, silk, hemp, cement, flour and risotto rice.Tobias Jones travels the length of the river against the current, gathering stories of battles, writers, cuisines, entertainers, religious minorities and music. Both an ecological lament and a celebration of the resourcefulness and resilience of the people of the Po, the book opens a window onto a stunning, but now neglected, part of Italy.

Why is it that the more advanced our society becomes, the unhappier we are?Seeking an answer from the only honest perspective, Tobias Jones and his wife opened up their family home and ten acre woodland to those going through crises in their lives, or suffering from depression, addiction and loneliness.They will encounter extraordinary people: from 'Roadkill Kev' to 'Mary Poppins'; build a chapel, raise pigs and encounter both violent antagonism and astounding generosity. At the same time, they will open themselves, their children and their ideals up to the most demanding of judgements and transformations.Five years on, they think they are on to something. To sit down to eat together, to work on the land, to have no tolerance for drugs but a lot of tolerance for change – it takes time and many mistakes, but they have found a way to help people.This is the story of how.