One night. A woman the whole world knew - and no one ever truly listened to.
Rome, 1973. In a silent drawing room in Palazzo Altieri, a young provincial journalist knocks on Anna Magnani's door. It was meant to be an interview like any other. It becomes the confession of an entire life.
As the night deepens and the city sleeps, Anna speaks without defences: the child left behind, who learned to be abandoned before she learned to be chosen. The girl written off, who turned to fire on stage. The woman loved by Rossellini and betrayed in silence. The mother who boarded a train every night for a son far away.
And behind the hoarse voice, the laughter, the pride, the secret she carried all her life: a hunger for love that never went out.
A novel that gives us Anna Magnani as you have never read her: not the myth, but the woman. Fragile and untameable, alone and immense - true in every moment, as only she knew how to be.
"Behind that closed door, she is still there."
Matteo Persica has devoted twenty years of research to Anna Magnani. He is the author of Anna Magnani. Biografia di una donna, which Maurizio Costanzo called "the finest book ever written about Anna Magnani".
Also available in Italian, French and Spanish.