Iginio Ugo Tarchetti was an Italian poet, author, and journalist of the 19th century. He was born in San Salvatore Monferrato and started his career in the military, a tall, blue-eyed, handsome man. But he later ceased to continue his service because of ill-health. He eventually forced to settle down because of it, but he then had time to take up literature and become part of the literary movement Scapigliatura. He published several of his stories, novels, and poems in different newspapers.
Fantastic Tales was originally written in Italian, but later became Tarchetti’s first piece of literary work translated into English. Unfortunately, he appropriated several different authors' works as his own, which can be seen as plagiarism. However, he wrote many pieces of his own, Fantastic Tales being one of them.
This volume is composed of five short stories by Tarchetti, which include the following: “The Legends of the Black Castle, A Spirit in a Raspberry, A Dead Man's Bone, The Elixir of Immortality, and The Fated”. It currently holds 3.5/5 stars on Goodreads and has a wide audience of Italian as well as English readers.
Eventually, Tarchetti contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of 29 on March 25, 1869, in Milan, Italy. Although his stories are from long ago, many people of different nationalities and tongues still enjoy his tales to this day.
