2 Then came the river and the bend by which the bell towers were visible for the first time, the ruin looming up behind them like the hull of an immense capsized ship. To the left was the toll road to Italy running south between the willow rows; to the right the canal which held the half-moon-shaped town fast against the foothills, laddering up into the pines (p 22)

A few months after I'd drawn my map from memory I came across this photograph, taken from the air, of the village as it would have looked at the time of the Anschluss, when the army of the Third Reich marched into Austria entirely unopposed. The house and gardens which served as a model for Voxlauer, my protagonist's birthplace and the home of his mother, the aging opera diva Dora Voxlauer, can just be made out in the upper left-hand corner of the picture, above the town moat and below the little church.

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