Where it was filmed 'La Lupa'

In the village she was called la Lupa—the She-Wolf—because she was never satisfied.

Giovanni Verga 

Director Gabriele Lavia selected the ancient borgo of Vizzini (CT), Giovanni Verga’s birthplace and setting for several of his novellas, as the location for La Lupa. The 18^th century ghost town of Cunziria is a place crystalised in time where the sexual provocations of Gnà Pina, known to all as the She-Wolf (Monica Guerritore), unsettle the immobility of an archaic community whose life is supported by repetitive work in the fields. The woman falls in love with Nanni (Raoul Bova) on his return from military service “for surely it means to be in love when she felt the flesh burn under the fustian shift, and on looking at him to experience the thirst that one has in hot June days down in the low-lands”. However, the young man prefers her daughter to whom he proposes. It is October when the She-Wolf goes to find Nanni who is working in the ancient oil press of Buscemi (SR) to accept his proposal.

Lavia’s cinema adaptation of Verga’s novella was not the first, in 1953 Alberto Lattuada set a version in the Sassi of Matera.