Ferrante’s second book in her Neapolitan quartet, The Story of a New Name, is now on HBO. It is very, very good. As with the first season, the characters appear to emerge from the pages of the book. I am reliving my reading and it is intense. As the characters age, of course the complexities increase and like the books, everything darkens. In fact, last night I could watch only one of the two episodes now available–just too much. In addition, any illusions that I might actually understand at least some of the Italian spoken have been dashed. I guess I’d better upgrade Duolingo. It’s probably a good idea to look at the list of characters with descriptions as a review before watching the second series. Tonight Episode 2. Review to follow.
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New York Cynic 
Yes – we are watching it as well. Very vivid! Only read the first book so am following the story line (and recalling the first show). X
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Thanks for posting. We just got HBO. Do you know if you can still see episode 1 before tonight’s episode 2. Are they archived or if you missed one, tough luck?
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Both Season 1 and the first two episodes of Season 2 can be accessed. I think a new episode comes out once a week.
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I think the Neapolitan dialect makes the spoken Italian difficult to understand. Have you asked BruceP?
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Difficult?? Try impossible.
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Hi Randy and Susan: I have been sent the series taken off the air of Italian TV by a friend in Rome. It has Italian subtitles for the considerable amount of Neopolitan dialect in the episodes. But for the Italian proper, it doesn’t have any. Also a value with the mp4 file is i can stop it, reverse it, and re-read the Italian. It’s a great vocabulary builder. Let me know if you’d like me to send you the file. It only contains episodes from the 2nd year (this year) and is not entirely complete, so that sucks….
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One of these days would love to watch the dvd. Interesting about the dialect. Do most Italians not understand the Naples dialect (or at least the dialect of her area of Naples?
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Anthropological linguists say that there is some mutual intelligibility among southern Italia and Sicilian dialects. But each is a distinct, unintelligible language vis-a-vis standard Italian.
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