 Although Neruda and Matilde (who were not yet married) did sojourn to Italy during his exile from Chile and stayed on the Isle of Capri on-and-off between 1951 and 1952, they were guests in Edwin Cerio's villa there and did not have their own house.At that time Neruda had not yet achieved the world-wide fame as a poet that he had by the early 1970s when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.The poems quoted in both the film and the opera were written several years after he returned to Chile.