This was an interesting read, not quite an autobiography, maybe somewhere in between a memoir and a travelogue. Through familial contacts and a mixture of circumstance and serendipitous happenings, Daphne Phelps, a young psychiatric social worker becomes the custodian and then the owner of a beautiful house in Taormina, Sicily.
There is an obvious lack of income to run the property and so it becomes an informal type of B and B and it is here that the writer spends the next 50 years of her life. Friends and family come and stay for extended periods of time and many now famous names pass through: Caitlin Thomas (wife of Dylan) Tennessee Williams and the painter Henry Faulkner, also a thoroughly unpleasant and disreputable Roald Dahl and his wife Felicity. There are diplomatic and ambassadorial visits, mayors and even the leader of the local mafia. They are all intrigued by this house run by an English woman in the ultra-traditional and backward society of post war Sicily. I kept expecting Patrick Leigh Fermor to turn up but if he did he failed to make it into the book.
Historically and geographically this is illuminating, speaking as it does of an isolated land coping with an active volcano, the vagaries of the sea, and until the late 20th century, poor health and educational facilities.
The book is written with humour and compassion by someone I would like to have met. She made unusual and sometimes brave life choices and thus enjoyed an unconventional and obviously very satisfying life.