Are we the other? While the issue of migration continues to be a symbolic frontier on which different visions clash, even within political coalitions themselves, in Italy, Europe, and around the world, the new season of Rai1's fiction series will open with 'La vita promessa' (scheduled to air on September 11). It's the story of Carmela Carrizzo, a "courageous mother" who left Sicily for America in the early 900s, hoping to give her five children a better future. Four episodes in which director Ricky Tognazzi reminds Italians that we too were migrants, through the story of Luisa Ranieri (Carmela), who leaves for New York, and Lina Sastri, in the role of Assunta Moggi, a "gruff but kind-hearted" woman who runs a "disorder" in Naples, renting rooms even to desperate people leaving for the promised land. The cast of the miniseries (a co-production between Rai Fiction and Picomedia, produced by Roberto Sessa) also includes Francesco Arca, Thomas Trabacchi, Miriam Dalmazio, Primo Reggiani, Cristiano Caccamo. During filming, Tognazzi had emphasized that "often, in this dramatic moment, we Italians forget that since the early 900s we have traveled and 'conquered' the Americas." The series, Ranieri added, "tells a story of immigration and desperation, which speaks of the migrants of that time while recounting the tragedy of immigration today." The Carrizzo family is the epic story of one of the many Sicilian families set against the backdrop of the largest migratory exodus in modern history during the 20s. The series will tell the story of surprising destinies and ancestral passions born in Sicily and developed elsewhere, bringing with it all the fragrance, honor, and wisdom of an ancient and proud land. The protagonist Luisa Ranieri is the Sicilian Carmela, beautiful, intense: she is thirty years old and with her husband Salvatore she raises their children, like one of the many families who live on the lands of Baron Musumeci. Spano', the baron's right-hand man, is actually a cruel corporal and it will be he, together with his men, who kill Salvatore in an ambush. Carmela then decides to sell everything and leave with her children for Naples, waiting to board the steamer for America. In New York, the woman faces difficulties and disappointments: her new husband, Pachino, married by proxy, introduces her to the dark side of Little Italy where a handful of criminals, affiliated with gangs, blackmail poor unfortunates like him on behalf of the "Black Hand". The suffering of Carmela's children in a hostile culture alternates with their struggle to gain a social position, even in crime. Carmela's adventure is closely intertwined with that of another woman, Rosa, a prostitute of Sicilian origin who marries Carmela's son, who is suffering from a mental disability, by proxy. It is Carmela who plots the deception, to secure a wife for Rocco, but ends up inflicting on Rosa the same fate, if not perhaps more bitter, that had befallen her. The scripts are the posthumous work of one of the most well-known and appreciated screenwriters on Italian TV, Laura Toscano (Commesse, Il maresciallo Rocca) with Franco Marotta. The script was revised by Simona Izzo. The series received financial support from the Apulia Film Commission.
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