cwho knows if we will remember the letter carrier of Lizzanello di Francesca Giannone among the great female figures who, having fully accepted the potential of their being women, have made it an element of strength, not weakness, writing an original piece of history in a world designed for men. We are in Salento in the 1930s, in the square of a small town Anna get off a busa beautiful woman with green eyes, originally from the North, and her husband Carlo, who instead returns home. From here begins a lively human comedy of loves, ambitions and destinies spanning twenty years, which sees in Anna, the first postwoman of the country, a modern and independent figure, the director of meetings and thrusts towards the future.
Francesca Giannone, after a few years in Bologna, returned to live in Puglia. You have published several short stories; this is her first novel. Photo: Nazareno Ruggieri
In this way Francesca Giannone, forty-year-old Salento writer and great-granddaughter of the protagonistin his literary debut takes us into a great historical and training novel, woven with maturity and wisdom, which it speaks to each of us in the way that a fragment of life contains and can restore the whole cosmos.
Let’s start with you, when did you start dreaming of becoming a writer?
I studied in Rome, then in Bologna I attended the writing school of Carlo Lucarelli, Bottega Finizioni, which was very important for learning the discipline. Then when the Bolognese adventure was over I returned to live in Salento, which I feel like a community. In reality, as a child, I dreamed above all of being a journalist and I loved collecting stories from the people of the village, I have also always been a great reader of stories, until I happened to write my own, and I felt I was in my place.
The story of Francesca Giannone’s letter carrier
And how did this story come about?
I’d say she came looking for me. During the pandemic I stopped working professionally, I was at my parents’ house and one day rummaging in the drawers I received a business card from a hundred years ago: it was that of my great-grandmother Anna, the first female postwoman of Lizzanello and perhaps of Italy. I started doing research and reconstructing her story, my mother had been her favorite niece, she had given her many memoirs of her and she had also extracted a promise: “Do not let me be forgotten”.
How did she reconstruct the world and the characters around her?
Anna’s story is true, for the rest there is a lot of fiction, but inspired by truth. To restore the era and the Salento of the early 1900s, I did a lot of research, but I also based myself on my childhood, on the figures I saw in the village. And then there were the stories of my mother and some children of the time, now elderly people, who had known her. When voices started to emerge from this whole collection, I moved on to writing. It was a three year adventure.
From the first moment we understand that Anna is different from the crowd: she reads, thinks, wants to work, follows politics. Are you introducing it to us?
Anna is a woman who wants to be herself and considers herself equal to her husband Carlo. She doesn’t walk ahead or behind him, but beside her. She is a woman for whom the home dimension or being a mother is not enough, she wants to determine herself with something outside her domestic hearth, through her work. And this is a revolutionary thought in the 1930s in Salento, a sign of great courage to challenge what others think. Anna also has a husband who supports her, scared when she responds to the job offer as a postman and when she shows her political interest in her, but he loves her precisely because she is independent and because she is like that.
Among the novelties of Anna, compared to other historical female icons, is that she makes her revolution without rebellion, she remains faithful to her role as a woman, mother and wife, despite being loved and in love with her brother-in-law.
The love reciprocated and never lived with Antonio, Carlo’s brother, is a creation for the novel, but I know that she has always been very caring with my great-grandfather, but caring she was primarily with herself. There was no pattern of rupture, but of integrity.
All the characters of Francesca Giannone
Do you also introduce us to the other characters that revolve around you?
Carlo, in fact, is a man from the south, who has returned to the village after ten years, very sure of what he is doing, with his own sense of justice. He has a strong bond with his brother Antonio, who however, from the first moment he sees her, falls in love with Anna, with whom he has an exchange through books and through underlined literary words. Agata, her wife, suffers all her life from her gaze elsewhere, and Lorenza, their daughter, is an emotional addict, who makes mistakes, just to get attached to someone. Giovanna, initially the lover of a parish priest and then a guest in Anna’s house, becomes her friend: she too is different. Then there are Carmela, Roberto, son of Anna and Carlo, Daniele… But I don’t want to reveal the surprises.
Is there also a North-South dynamic in Italy?
Anna comes from Pigna, in Liguria, and will always remain “the stranger”. She will follow the rules, but she will bring progress. She finds a balance, even if at the price of solitude.
Francesca Giannone’s letter carrier, North Publisher416 pages, €19
It is also a great novel about love…
Love declined in many shades. There’s brotherly love, sentimental love, family love, sick love… There’s also my love for the characters, regardless, even when they’re wrong.
Anna, by carrying letters from house to house, sews stories, becomes the director of a world. Is it a bit what the writer also does with the novel?
I like this picture. Yes, she writes destinies and completely rewrites the history of her country. Within an important era that goes from the ’30s, during fascism, and then from ’45, to the ’50s. Anna takes part in history from that small corner of the world: she brings the soldiers’ letters, reads them to those who can’t read, she founds the Women’s House for female evolution. History stops before the feminist revolution, but maybe she already anticipates it.
The style is modern and classic. How did you post it, did you have models?
I read many female authors, I’m a fan of Elena Ferrante’s Brilliant Friend, but in reality here I started from the story and the style came by itself. The idea was also to collect the life of a piece of humanity in a small town, but to speak a bit to all of us.
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