The period of exile of the Latvian writer Jānis Rainis (1865–1929) in Castagnola (Switzerland) lasted from 1906 to 1920. Rainis decided to return once again to Castagnola in 1926 and 1927 in order to shape his Castagnola moods into a book. The result was a book entitled Castagnola (1927), one of the rather rare prose works by Rainis, which is now also available in Estonian (Jānis Rainis Castagnola. Teise kodumaa mälestusradadel. University of Tartu Press. 2021). Excerpts from Rainis’s diaries from his Castagnola period (1906–1919) have been selected for this article. The 24th volume of Rainis’s Collected Works has been used. It was published in 1986 and is precisely where the diaries that covered Rainis’s Swiss period were published (Rainis’s diaries were published in the 24th and 25th volumes of his collected works. Both were published in 1986. The first entry in Rainis’s diaries dates from 1882, while the last entries were made in 1929 – the year of his death). Soviet rule turned Rainis into a cult writer, much like Eduard Vilde in Estonia. While energetic ‘Vilde-isation’ took place in Estonia (streets, schools, and kolkhozes bore the name of Vilde), energetic ‘Rainisisation’ similarly took place in Latvia. Yet hopefully, both Rainis’s Castagnola and these excerpts from his diaries nevertheless paint a different kind of picture of Rainis and his pipedreams.