by InTrieste
A new film premiering at the Venice Film Festival is shining a spotlight once again on the rich tradition of Trieste’s literary heritage on screen — and on the women who have fought to preserve it.
Laura Samani, a 35-year-old director from Trieste, will present Un anno di scuola on August 31 at the Lido. The film, shot in her native city, is inspired by Giani Stuparich’s 1929 story of the same name. Samani, whose debut feature Small Body (Piccolo corpo) won multiple awards four years ago, has relocated Stuparich’s tale of the only girl in a boys’ high school class in 1909 to the Trieste of 2007 and 2008, drawing from her own experience.
It is not the first time Stuparich’s text has been adapted. In 1977, director Franco Giraldi made a television version that became one of the best-loved films derived from Trieste’s literary tradition. But before Samani’s project, audiences had to look back nearly three decades to find another fictional film tied directly to Trieste’s writers and libraries: Cristina Comencini’s Follow Your Heart (Va’ dove ti porta il cuore), based on Susanna Tamaro’s best-selling novel.
That long gap, and the fact that both landmark films were directed by women, highlights a recurring theme in Trieste’s literary cinema. Much of the city’s best-known literature of the early 20th century — by Stuparich, Saba, Svevo, and Joyce — revolved around questions of social change, modernity, and the shifting roles of women. Strong, restless, and often elusive female figures haunted their work, and women filmmakers have carried that legacy forward on screen.
The roots of this tradition trace back to Letizia Fonda Savio, the daughter of Italo Svevo. When director Mauro Bolognini and producer Moris Ergas prepared to adapt Svevo’s Senilità in 1961, foreign backers pushed to move the setting to Venice. Fonda Savio insisted the film remain in Trieste, and production took place in the city where the novel was set. It was the first time a major adaptation of a Triestine novel was filmed on location, and critics at the time praised the city’s raw photogenic quality and international character.
That breakthrough helped establish Trieste as a cinematic backdrop for its literature. Films followed, including Giraldi’s Un anno di scuola (1977), Salvatore Samperi’s Ernesto (1978) from Umberto Saba, Aldo Lado’s La città di Miriam(1983) from Fulvio Tomizza, Sandro Bolchi’s television adaptation of La coscienza di Zeno (1988), and Comencini’s Follow Your Heart (1996). In the early 2000s, international projects such as Mathieu Amalric’s Le stade de Wimbledonand Pat Murphy’s Nora — inspired by Trieste’s literary figures though not written by them — added to the canon.
Samani’s choice to revisit Stuparich’s story underscores both continuity and change. By shifting the tale from 1909 to the early 21st century, she connects the struggles of the past with the present, underlining what she describes as the enduring cost for a young woman of growing up “in a world dominated by men.”
For Trieste, a city whose cultural identity has long been shaped by its writers, the film represents more than an adaptation. It marks a return to the city itself as a living set — not a picturesque stand-in, but the authentic stage of its own history.
