Du Maurier loved Italy and visited it many times, though it is uncertain whether she went to Urbino before she wrote The Flight of the Falcon, for which she seems to have used a researcher. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.Ĭuriously, The Flight of the Falcon is the only one of du Maurier's novels to be set in Italy-though 'Don't Look Now,' her masterpiece short story, had Venice for its setting. Those were the days in which the waspish whine of a Vespa in the Eternal City carried young couples as beautiful as Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, not a pair of muggers out to rob the unwary walker. Mass tourism was in its infancy then, and the kind of tours that du Maurier's hero, Fabbio, takes around Italy were more innocent, less commonplace and less world-weary than one suspects they are now.

Rome was incomparably lovely, a place where artists still came to learn from antiquity, where the privileged enjoyed the dolce vita celebrated by Fellini's film of that name, and the less privileged were desperate for American dollars.

The shadows of the Second World War, and the appalling poverty that made Italy so vulnerable to Fascism, were on the wane. The Flight of the Falcon was published in 1965, coincidentally the year my own family moved to Italy, to the very city where the novel opens: Rome.

Daphne du maurier flight of the falcon