Three beautiful places to call home and the love of his life, Chris Harrison has it all.

It’s the end of a marathon interview, the longest I’ve ever done, and yet it feels I’ve still so much to learn about this animated, comical and witty Australian … or is that Italian? It’s hard to tell.

Author and freelance journalist Chris Harrison is the epitome of the wayward Aussie traveller. His attire speaks volumes about the metamorphosis he has experienced after some 1460 days in one of the world’s most captivating and notoriously fashionconscious countries. His accent too, shows signs of European exposure.

But it’s not these qualities alone that indicate an intrinsic shift in the free-spirited vagabond. It’s the gesturing of his hands when he talks – to the extent of drenching his Armani, or was it Gap, jeans with the remnants of his English breakfast.

It’s also apparent in his way of thinking and in his approach to life.

For all this, Chris says he has one “intoxicating” woman to thank. A woman with “eyes the colour of Guinness” and “the patience of a saint”. A woman he describes as Daniela, with “one l” who hails from the tiny fishing village of Andrano in Italy’s south and serves as the heroine in his debut book.

Head Over Heel – Seduced by a Southern Italian – is doing some seducing of its own, sending the Australian literary world into a tailspin since its release.

Though the impact of the many rave reviews is still to be seen, there’s one thing that’s certain: not since Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French have I read an account of an Australian living abroad as moving, insightful and side-splittingly hilarious as this from “Crris Arrison … with an H”.

After a weekend spent cackling over linguistic faux pas and shaking my head at the idiosyncrasies of an impossible nation, I have no doubt of the book’s worth.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from asking Chris why he thought the story of life in a sun-drenched coastal town in the “heel of Italy’s boot” worthy of the five painstaking years it would take to produce.

“I decided that I would write the book one morning at my breakfast table. It was about a year into my move to Italy. I looked out the window at the absurdities going on and I just thought I have to tell people about this,” he laughs. “There was just so much humour in their everyday situations.”

He highlights one example from his book to prove his point.

“You remember the handbag chapter with that police officer, it sounds like a Two Ronnie’s comedy strip,” he says.

He is referring to the antics of a clueless country cop or carabinieri, who, for the sake of convenience and an inability to think beyond the confines of bureaucratic documentation, preferred Daniela’s stolen and returned handbag remained missing. His reason – there was nothing on the form to identify stolen items that had been retrieved.

“I don’t know if you can script something like that,” Chris laughs. “That’s why I wrote the book, because the inherent humour and peculiarity of these people just stood out.”

“I mean a policeman rearranging crimes to suit the forms, a driving instructor doing the exam for his pupils, a medic making me drink a whole bottle of his lemon liquor and haggling with a vet over the price of a hysterectomy for my adopted stray dog were just bizarre experiences and I wanted to share them.”

As soon as Chris realised he was literally surrounded by material for a best seller he set to work, recording his eccentric encounters as he went.

“For example, after the police station, I came home and locked myself in the study for two days and wrote it all down because I could never do it as beautifully as it was done there. I recorded what happened, the dialogue, the furniture, everything.

“There was just reams and reams and reams of paper. I had anecdotes spread out all over the room and I had to thread them all together. It was terrible. I had a full head of hair before I started.”

As demanding as it was, it is these keen observations that make Chris’ account of Italian life so enchanting. But at the core of all this absurdity is a love story as compelling as any Jane Austen saga.

Despite the story’s focus on the trials and tribulations of courting an Italian signorina, Chris says writing a romance novel was never his intention.

That said, his amorous affair, just like the quirky yellow Fiat he and Daniela scooted about in, proves a handy vehicle in which to retrace his journey – potholes and all.

“Trying to get by in a southern village was very difficult,” Chris says. “But I couldn’t tell that without telling how I got there so the story of me and Daniela became the skeleton on which to hang the anecdotal flesh that I was witnessing.”

Chris now resides in the UK where he works as an English language teacher in between lecturing in publishing and writing.

For the past couple of months, he has been back in Australia, enjoying the solitude of his parents’ Trinity Beach home where he finished his first book and is now chipping away at his second.

“I’ve travelled around and lived in different places but I come back to Trinity Beach to put it all on paper,” he says. “It’s a great place to write and just be able to think. In London you’re writing around sirens and smog and chaos. I haven’t heard a siren since I’ve been here and you notice these things, it’s wonderful.”

I mockingly comment that it must be hard to have ties to three beautiful places, all of which he calls home.

“Everybody thinks it’s a privilege to know three worlds intimately, to have three nests, but it’s actually a pain,” Chris jokes before adding: “If I need to get dressed my belt is in Trinity Beach, my pants are in southern Italy and my shoes are in London”.

On a serious note, Chris admits spreading himself across multiple homelands has deprived him of a complete sense of belonging to any one place. But for this he has a solution.

“This is going to sound really corny but wherever Daniela is, is pretty much where I am at home. So I think at the moment home is London but home is also Trinity Beach, I adore this place,” he says.

“Italy and England, they’re old societies. They’ve got hangovers from an age when things weren’t done as logically as they are now. I mean I renewed my licence here the other day in about 20 minutes. In Italy it would take about 20 years, your hairline and your patience. It’s just not possible to do in the morning in Italy, it’s not possible to do in a month.

“When I moved to England I was watching a television program and they were all complaining about Royal Mail and I rang them up and told them to stop complaining. If you want to see a poor mail service come and see Poste Italiane. The postman delivered a parcel to me once and flung it into a palm tree. I found it two years later.”

And the anecdotes just keep coming.

“I’m doing a story at the moment on airlines because I’ve been amazed at how people are complaining about Jetstar and Qantas. Jetstar and Qantas are amazing. I took off the other day from an airport (overseas) and the stairs were still attached to the plane,” he says.

Chris says he and Daniela hope to leave England soon and return to Italy but he may be back in Oz sooner than he thinks.

“I adapt really well to wherever I am. When I’m in Italy I consider myself Italian, when I’m in England I consider myself English and when I’m in Australia I consider myself Australian,” he explains.

“But this trip has made me realise that the majority of me is Australian. I love Australia more than I love Italy and more than I love England … I just adore this country, I really do.”

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