Since this is the last novel I shall write, I beg to make a confession. This is a fiction, but a fiction transmuted from many realities: fragments of personal experience, portraits of men and women met along the pilgrim way, landscapes of islands and continents where I have sojourned in a travelling life.
I have come now to an age when the curtains between fact, fiction and the final mystery are wearing thin, so the reader must beware of too hasty identifications. He is not he: she is not she. It’s a trick done with mirrors!
The Farnese family became extinct in 1731. I have given myself the pleasure of resurrecting it by the addition of an ennobling predicate ‘di Mongrifone’.
The heraldry of this resurrected family has been designed by Archbishop Bernard Bruno Heim, who for nearly forty years has been the accepted authority on all matters of heraldry in the Roman Catholic Church. He has designed the coats of arms of four popes, and the seals for their administrations.
He bears no responsiblity at all for the follies of my Giulia or the machinations of her family and their modern peers. He lived through the epoch as I did. Unlike me, he has been bound by a clerical discretion not to record it.
Morris L West