Bruno Astuto: Rio de Janeiro between two covers

A book about Rio de Janeiro has to contend with images the reader already knows. Mountains, beach and water arrive before the first page is turned. Bruno Astuto’s Assouline volume takes those familiar views as the beginning of a wider portrait.

WAYFARER’s April 2025 account described Rio de Janeiro as a 304-page book with more than 200 images. Its subject extended from the city’s landscapes to the cultural life and stories that give those landscapes a human scale.

A Rio setting for the launch

The book was presented at Hotel Fasano in Ipanema on 7 April 2025. Friends of the journalist and writer gathered for the launch, including figures from Brazilian television, fashion and the city’s social scene.

That setting was apt without needing to stand in for the whole city. Ipanema supplies one recognisable chapter of Rio, while a substantial illustrated volume has room to move beyond a single neighbourhood or one idea of its inhabitants.

The original report placed the book within Assouline’s international distribution. For a reader outside Brazil, its value is the chance to encounter the city through a Brazilian narrator rather than a collection of disconnected travel recommendations.

This is an archival account of the publication and its launch, not a new review of every page. The proposition remains clear: Rio can be read as a city of cultural relationships as well as a sequence of famous views.

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Adapted from the WAYFARER Brazil archive, first published 2025-04-10. English adaptation: 6 October 2026. This is an archival account, not a report of a new visit. Exhibitions, collections and menu details are described in their original context, not as current availability.