Lotus Production is proud to announce the acquisition of the rights to LA PORTALETTERE by Francesca Giannone.
This is the story of Anna, a woman who decided to live her life without constraint, but it is also the story of the Greco family and the town of Lizzanello, from the 30s to the 50s, going through a world war and the fight for women’s rights.
And it is the story of two inseparable brothers, destined to love the same woman.
The novel is, so far, the publishing success of the year: to date it is the biggest selling debut novel of 2023 in Italy, continuously in the top ten best-sellers since its publication, and already in its 11th edition.
Salento, June 1934. In the main square of Lizzanello, a small town of just a few thousand inhabitants, a bus pulls up and a couple gets off: Carlo is from the south of Italy and he’s happy to be back home; Anna, his wife, is as beautiful as a Greek statue but is sad and worried: what kind of life awaits her in that unknown land?
Even thirty years later Anna will still be “the outsider” to everybody, the girl from the north, the different one, the one who doesn’t go to church, who always speaks her mind. And Anna, proud and out-spoken, will never yield to the unwritten rules that imprison the women of the south. And she will succeed thanks also to her love for her husband. A love whose strength will be painfully obvious to Carlo’s older brother, Antonio, who fell in love with Anna the moment he set eyes on her.
Then, in 1935, Anna does something truly revolutionary: she applies for a job with the post office and becomes the first postwoman in Lizzanello. The news makes the local women sneer and elicits sniggers from the men. “It won’t last,” snipe some.
Instead, for more than twenty years, Anna will become the invisible thread that unites the town’s inhabitants. First on foot and then by bicycle, she will deliver letters from the boys on the front, postcards from emigrants and messages from secret lovers. Without meaning to – and especially without the town wanting it – the postwoman will end up changing many things in Lizanello.
