Photographed and Written by Silvio Manno

110 pages and 150 beautiful color photos

The Forestiere Underground Gardens, located in Fresno, California are the remarkable achievement of a Sicilian immigrant: Baldassare Forestiere. Born on the outskirts of Messina, on the Island of Sicily, in 1879, Forestiere immigrated to America at age twenty-one. In 1905 he purchased a parched eighty-acre parcel of Central Valley farmland in the "wallows" of Fresno. But the land turned out to be other than the Garden of Eden it had been advertised. The soil was plagued with hardpan, a stony shale impossible to cultivate without the use of dynamite. Undaunted, Forstiere spent the next forty excavating an amazing underground adobe made up of sixty-five chambers interconnected by passage ways and complemented by outside patios. The book details the intricacy of this national treasure through a pictorial mosiac of one of the most magnificent architectural marvels ever built by a single man.

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"The Forestiere Underground Gardens"