Directed by Roberto Faenza, starring Margherita Buy, Luca Zingaretti, Goran Bregovic, Alessia Goria, Gea Lionello, Italy, 2005, 96’
A woman is talking on the telephone in a phone booth: she complains to the operator and asks that her personal phone line be reactivated. Her two children are waiting for her outside the booth. The woman’s name is Olga and she is the lead character in The Days of Abandonment. This sequence was shot in Piazza Cavour, in Turin; and more precisely, in the gardens that make up a large part of the piazza.
Olga was unexpectedly abandoned by her husband, who took a fancy for a woman who is much younger than she is. After falling into a deep crisis, she only starts to recover when she meets a solitary and rather introverted musician who lives in the same apartment building she does. Their building is located at Piazza Cavour 10, in Turin.
Based on the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante, the movie is entirely set in Turin. Even the director, Roberto Faenza, was born in Piedmont’s capital, where he also shot several sequences of The Soul Keeper. The Days of Abandonment has many locations; besides Piazza Cavour, the film is set in Via Accademia delle Scienze, Piazza della Repubblica, the Parco del Valentino and the Parco Dora shopping mall.
