Synopsis

Anna is thirsty. The whole city has been thirsty for weeks. Some will call them the days of the Great Thirst, and others will remember them as the Four Days of Naples. It's 1943, and water is running out everywhere, except in the house where Anna lives with her family. As a line of women winds past the Casa del Miracolo, begging for just enough to quench their thirst, she wonders why her thirst seems so insatiable. Because what Anna feels is different: it's a thirst for life and a future of redemption. At twenty, she would like to attend classes at the Faculty of Literature, to read, to live in a world without rubble, without the constant ambush of air raid sirens. But there's no time for dreams. Her father is gone, her mother has withdrawn, her sister and nephew are ill. Their future depends on her. So, when she has the opportunity, Anna accepts a job as a secretary at the American base in Bagnoli. She enters a world she doesn't know, meeting people from a distant land, full of promise, simultaneously enchanting and terrifying, like all promises. The simplest thing would be to escape, leaving the painful years of war behind. But Anna doesn't want anyone else to save her. Just as Naples liberated itself, Anna must find her own way to salvation. Her great thirst is not easy to quench. It comes from within and speaks of independence and a love of knowledge, and, above all, of the courage needed to make oneself heard in a world that doesn't know how to listen.