La grande sete

Anna is thirsty. The whole city has been thirsty for weeks. Some will call these the days of the Great Drought, whilst others will remember them as the Four Days of Naples. It is 1943 and water is in short supply everywhere, except in the house where Anna lives with her family. Whilst a queue of women winds its way in front of the Casa del Miracolo, asking for just enough to quench their thirst, she wonders why her own thirst seems so insatiable. Because what Anna feels is different: it is a thirst for life and for a future of redemption. At twenty, she would like to attend lectures at the Faculty of Arts, to read, to live in a world without rubble, without the constant threat of air-raid sirens. But there is no time for dreams. Her father has disappeared, her mother has withdrawn into herself, her sister and nephew have fallen ill. Their future depends on her. So, when the opportunity arises, Anna accepts a job as a secretary at the American base in Bagnoli. She enters a world she does not know, meeting people from a distant land, full of promise, which enchants and terrifies at the same time, like all promises. The simplest thing would be to run away, to leave the painful years of the war behind. But Anna does not want anyone else to save her. Just as Naples freed itself, so too must Anna find her own path to salvation. The great thirst is not easy to quench. It comes from within and speaks of independence and a love of knowledge and, above all, of the courage needed to make oneself heard in a world that does not know how to listen. Erica Cassano makes her debut with a powerful and profound voice, capable of astonishing and moving, heartening and inspiring. La grande sete is the story of a small yet vast world, of its silences and its noises, of a yearning for something greater that resides within each of us.