It is curious that the author invented a fictional town in the Cinque Terre instead of using one of the five actual ones, but then used the real Richard Burton as a character. Not that I'm complaining. I loved the make believe town of Porto Vergogna, and enjoyed spending time there even though it lacks a beach or tennis court. And Burton gets the best lines in the book.

I just recently returned from the Cinque Terre and was thrilled to discover this novel set there. The most successful scenes in the novel are those set in 1962, when the lonely young Italian innkeeper Pasquale and the American starlet Dee Moray cross paths at the Hotel Adequate View. The novel eventually follows the characters to "recently", but the mystery of what brought Dee to the Ligurian Coast from the set of Cleopatra is what kept me rapt. Pasquale has eyes the color of the Ligurian Sea. I can picture that having been there recently. But it is a pair of violet eyes that haunt these pages, although Elizabeth Taylor herself does not actually make an appearance. But she of course was the furthest thing from a beautiful ruin.

I will close by saying that this is a genre busting kind of book, with language that sometimes pops and sometimes settles like poetry into the subconscious. It's a Hollyweird satire and a World War II chronicle. But mostly it is a romance, which makes sense for a novel about a place whose via Dell'Amore along the cliffs between the sea and the steeply terraced hills is one of the most romantic walks in the world.