Elena Ferrante's cult Naples novels to become TV serial

(ANSA) - Naples, March 9 - Elena Ferrante's wildly popular Neapolitan novels are to be turned into a TV series directed by Italian film director Saverio Costanzo.
    Casting will start in Naples tomorrow for the series based on the four novels of the tetralogy: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child.
    Casting director Laura Muccino is seeking girls to play the principal roles of Lina and Lenù, characters who have developed a cult international following.
    The series, called The Neapolitan Novels, will tell the tale of the two female protagonists' interwoven stories from their childhood at the end of WWII to the turn of the millennium.
    Costanzo, whose credits include Private, The Solitude of Primary Numbers and Hungry Hearts, is writing the screenplay with Neapolitan novelist Francesco Piccolo and writer Laura Paolucci, with the help of Ferrante, whose identity is still an official secret although she was outed last year as a Roman translator of German feminist fiction, Anita Raja, prompting an international outcry among the novelist's protective fans. Raja has previously denied she was the author.
    Costanzo told The New York Times in a telephone interview that he wasn't interested in the author's true identity. "It's her literary reality that counts," he said. "I'm one of those people who don't care who she is." Locations have yet to be chosen but the Campania Film Commission hopes the whole series can be filmed in Naples, apart from parts of the works that are set in Milan, Pisa and France.
    Costanzo told the NYT that the biggest challenge to adapting the novels for television was how "to convey the same emotions as the books in a cinematographic way."