BLOG: Fact is stranger than fiction - especially in southern Italy

Before writing about Italy, I had always believed there was no such thing as true non-fiction; writers must make their 'stories' as entertaining as possible, embellishing here and embroidering there. But over-gild the lily and that story might be deemed unbelievable, implausible, too absurd to be true.

Italy's Nobel Prize winning author, Luigi Pirandello, suggested no shrewd audience would believe the true story of Albert Heintz - protagonist in a love triangle who convinced himself, his wife and his lover that the best solution to their amorous impasse was for each of them to commit suicide. When his wife promptly did so, both Albert and his mistress could no longer find a reason to discontinue their love affair, marrying shortly after the wife's funeral.

Pirandello, born rather aptly in the Sicilian town of Caos, claimed that any play or novel based on this story would be dismissed as unrealistic. "This is because life," said Pirandello, "with all its brazen absurdities, small and large, has the invaluable privilege of being able to do without this ridiculous realism that art seems duty bound to adhere to. Any real event can be absurd; a work of art, if it is a work of art, cannot."

While writing HEAD OVER HEEL, I too had concerns about my Italian experiences being deemed unrealistic, experiences which defied decoration and whose inherent humour and peculiarity were far more absurd than anything I could ever contrive. Like Federico Fellini's films, the most revealing Italian stories reflect rather than invent, holding an unpolished mirror up to the Italians whose best comedy is achieved when being serious.

And so HEAD OVER HEEL is the unadorned yet colourful tale Italy told me during the years of my own love affair with an Italian, whose mother I might add was born a short distance from where Pirandello now rests. And I swear on his grave that despite a few name, place and time changes, the book is a true work of non-fiction, which, while a blow to my ego perhaps, could never be considered a 'work of art'.