We had left Lidia Poët with suitcases in hand late at night, leaving for America, in the background King Of Florence + The Machineon the other side of the ocean there is a future waiting for her with Andrea, the young businessman with whom she had a free and fulfilling relationship, but at the gate of the villa she shares with her brother Enrico, a crowd of women awaits her to applaud her to thank her. “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king” he sings Florence Welch. Lidia puts her bags on the ground, America can wait.
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Back October 30th The law of Lidia PoëtNetflix’s most watched Italian series in the world; the show with Matilda De Angelis has totaled the highest number of hours watched. “The fact that this series has won millions of viewers shows that our cultural heritage can have a great impact globally – said the producer Matteo Rovere – It is a confirmation of the potential of Italian productions. We have a linguistic weakness, in the world there are no more than 70 million people who understand Italian compared to 300 who understand French, 600 who understand Spanish, not to mention the Anglo-Saxons, but we have other arrows in our bow, including a creative juice which belongs to talents such as machinists and toolmakers who are envied throughout the world”.
The Law of Lidia Poët, Matilda De Angelis from first female lawyer to suffragette for women’s vote
In the new six episodes, six new crimes to investigate, six new cases in which the first female lawyer in the history of Italy decides to stick her nose in for professional reasons or for an innate ability to get into trouble while a story, hers, plays out through all six episodes. In the meantime, Lidia has decided to stay in Turin, to continue fighting for women’s rights, and not to give up in her determination to have her law degree recognized and be registered in the register. In historical truth Lidia Poët fought in the courts for 36 years before seeing her right recognised, in the meantime that serial in this new season has an even more ambitious objective: to convince Parliament that the time has come for women to vote. To obtain it he needs someone to carry on his battle in Rome and who else could it be if not the shy, reserved yet intelligent brother Enrico? The problem is just convincing him.
So while Lidia seeks support in the complex Piedmontese society for her law of universal suffrage, while she investigates the most varied crimes (a mysterious poisoning in a girls’ college, a series of murders of women behind which there could be a serial murderer, a in prison and another during a wedding) she still has time to complicate her already complex love life.
Matilda De Angelis is Lidia Poet, Gianmarco Saurino and Fourneau
The relationship with the journalist Jacopo Barberis, her sister-in-law’s brother, played by Eduardo Scarpettais put to the test by a series of family and personal situations. In the meantime, a new protagonist makes room in Lidia’s life: he is the King’s prosecutor Fourneau, played by Gianmarco Saurino, an institutional man who unexpectedly treats Lidia as his equal, pushing her to question the complex and contradictory relationship she has with feelings, and the cost of the personal renunciation (“no mother, no bride”) that she is supporting in the name of her ideals.
All this in a very delicate historical moment: the issues between men and women, between parents and children are still characterized by patriarchal dynamics and although society is opening up to a whole series of innovations (the telephone will arrive at the Poët house, Lidia will discover a new game played with a racket, it’s tennis) there is still a long way to go for women’s emancipation. Turin at the end of the 19th century is a political powder keg and Lidia will find herself in the middle of a series of political plans. “That Turin is a realistic inspiration for us which paradoxically helped us to make the story anything but dusty – he says Matteo Rovere – Because it was a city in great expansion, with public works, ten years before the foundation of Fiat, the Mole Antonelliana under construction, the king with the court but also the anarchist circles, the Camorra, the entrepreneurs, the socialists. From that era is the first tangent in the history of Italy, the birth of psychiatric hospitals, newspapers, theaters open in the evening, beauty contests: it is a phase of great excitement for a city where everything is possible”. Even for a woman to ask to vote.
