Where it was filmed 'The Lying Life of Adults'

“The borough is called il Pianto. But people laugh there. It’s here in Naples but it’s like another planet.
It looks dirty but it’s just poor.
The people who live there are always washing things, they are obsessed with cleaning.
If a sewer pipe were to burst there, it would smell of washing powder.”

Naples, in the Netflix series based on the novel by Elena Ferrante The Lying Life of Adults, is actually two cities: the upper part where people use gentility as a mask and the lower where they fake an ostentatious carefree extravagance. Different styles of humanity share the city which the adolescent Giovanna roams on foot, public transport or riding her beat-up vespa, alone or with friends, as if they were different floors of the same apartment building. With its contrasts, its colours, its differences, Naples is clearly an integral part of the story.

The “upper” city is via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto, which includes the Vomero-Arenella neighbourhood: this is the world where the main character Giovanna lives, apparently happily, with her family in an apartment overlooking the bridge of San Giacomo dei Capri, an unfinished construction from the 1980s. Locations also include Posillipo – where family friends Mariano and Costanza live in a villa overlooking the sea with their daughters Angela and Ida – and one of the best views of the city, the rampe di Sant’Antonio, and la Terrazza, a panoramic viewpoint of the gulf of Naples and Mount Vesuvius.

At a moment in her adolescence, however, Giovanna feels the need to know more about herself, she wants to know her new face, and to do that she has to go down into the “lower” part of the city to meet the family of her father for the first time. This family has the face and extravagance of aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino) whose apartment is in a rundown building in the neighbourhood known as Il Pianto (Pascone in the novel), actually Poggioreale. Here the city changes appearance, there are different colours and sights. Locations used for the series include: via Carlo di Tocco and via Emanuele Gianturco, in the industrial area, via Traccia in Poggioreale, and nearby via Domenico de Roberto, via del Macello. The Rione Luzzatti, between these neighbourhoods, was also used for the shoot.

The production also shot in Milan, in particular on the Navigli at the home of Roberto (Giovanni Buselli), a young university docent in theology born and raised in Pascone. Another scene uses the large courtyard and porticoes of Ca’ Granda, once the setting for the Hospital Maggiore, now for the State University.