A FALCON IN LOVE WITH A DOVE

I mentioned I’d see the first episode of IL FALCO E LA COLOMBA (The Falcon and the Dove) this weekend, and did it just this morning. It was broadcast on Italian TV, Canale 5, last Tuesday. It is a six-part costume drama set in central Italy in the 16th century. They say it is loosely ( and indeed it is ) taken from a novella by Stendhal, "The Abbess of Castro" . 

(You can read it online HERE)

The context

1528: It was a hard time. Rome was ruled by wicked and corrupt Pope Clemens VII, with unfair and uncertain laws . There were plots for power and fratricidal fights. The landlords took up arms and started bloody fights in order to grow their richness, lands and power while their people could barely eat and not every day.

Love was a notion left to the poets and very briefly mentioned in the wedding vows. Women were given in marriage to men they didn’t even know and , even less, love. In that cruel and unjust world, a young couple of lovers live an extraordinary series of adventures.

Episode 1

Elena Campireali (Cosima Coppola), a beautiful noble young lady, has just left the convent of Castro, where she was educated. She belongs to a wealthy family from Albano, loyal to Pope Clemens VII. She dearly loves her mother, Beatrice (Sabina Began), and Marietta (Alessandra Barzaghi), her most reliable maid. Beatrice has planned for her daughter a marriage of convenience with Prince Savelli (Fabio Testi), a powerful Lord very close to the Pope . Giulio (Giulio Berruti), a handsome, brave brigand fighting for Prince Colonna, an opponent to the Pope, and Elena couldn’t be more distant: because of tehir rank, because of the rivalry between the environments they belong to, because of their different education: he is a falcon and she is a dove. Despite all that, they meet and fall in love.

Their first meeting is both adventurous and amusing: he is escaping from papal soldiers and hides inside a confessional in an isolated church. Elena stops there to get some rest during her journey back home from the convent. She wants to speak about her secret fears to a priest, in the intimacy of a confession.  But it is not exactly a patient priest, the person who is listening to her.

Their second meeting is rather shocking for Elena. She has a tamed dove she loves and, while she was going horse-riding, she sees it attacked and killed by a falcon. The predator belongs to Giulio who, then,  tries to calm down the angry, disappointed girl. They soon recognize each other after their first meeting and are rather embarassed. She leaves him without answering his questions. She doesn’t reveal him her name, either.

Elena meets her future husband, Prince Savelli. He is kind and generous to her. He will also  ask the Pope to appoint Fabio Campireali, Elena’s brother, as one of his cardinals and will pay her parents a great sum in order to marry her. She is much younger than him and so beautiful.

Meanwhile,  Giulio has discovered Elena’s identity and, risking his life , he starts wooing her : secretly entering the guarded palace at night, leaving flowers and doves in her bedroom, healing her wounded dove for her, going to a masked ball in her fiance’s palace - in order to kill him. Elena is divided between her sense of duty and her feelings for Giulio. She doesn’t know anything about love and starts asking her maid, Marietta, her mother and her governess: “What is there after the kissing?”

Of course, none of them will answer her question. She will discover it by herself before the end of this first episode, thanks to Giulio.
 She is promised to Prince Savelli and has to marry him by six months;  her brother, as a cardinal of the Pope , is considered an enemy by Prince Colonna, Giulio’s boss. What will the two lovers do now?

What I liked

1.The locations, the costumes, the natural setting – so beautiful and so familiar. The series was shot in the area where I live. For example, Prince Savelli’s Palace is an awesome renaissance villa with fountains in Tivoli (half an hour from my town) called Villa D’Este. I’ve been there several times and was so excited at seeing it on the screen as the setting of a costume drama.

2. Tha parties and the balls scenes

3. Ana Galiena (Elena’s governess), Sabina Began (Elena’s mother), Enrico Lo Verso (Armido, one of Giulio’s mates) were very good in their roles.

4. Giulio Berruti (Giulio), as long as he was silent. He is undeniably and undoubtedly extremely handsome.

What I didn’t like

1. The fact that the two lead actors were extremely beautiful but very bad at delivering their lines, meaning they are not very good actors. They are not experienced and it is obvious they did not attend any drama school. As it usually happens in our beautiful Italy, if you are good – looking you can become an actor, a tv presenter, a dancer on TV programmes, even a minister (ooops, sorry, this is not a political blog!) though you do not have any talent or skills.

2. The language of the script . Too modern, trivial and obvious sometimes. Not at all probable in a Renaissance context.

Overall impression? I’ll see next episode, or better I’ll record it on Tuesday night, in order to see it with calm at the weekend.

I’ll leave you with a clip from IL FALCO E LA COLOMBA, I found on Utube. I know it’s in Italian and many of you are English native speakers. Just have a look at the awasome costumes and locations. They deserve attention and admiration.

Have you noticed? A masked ball. Rather Shakespearean, isn’t it? Like in “Romeo and Juliet”or “Much Ado about Nothing”. What lacks is … the quality of the lines, the poetry in the words. But never mind, have you seen how beautiful Villa D’Este is?
In the final part of the clip Elena tells Giulio she has finished reading a book about two lovers. She refers to Paolo and Francesca (Dante Alighieri tells about them in his Inferno) and she is worried and frightened because they were killed , after being discovered together, by Francesca’s husband. Is it a premonition? Is this their Fate, too?

If you want to know what happens to the two young lovers… follow this blog next week.

FRIDAY NIGHT MIXED POSTING

1. AN EXHAUSTING HARD WORKING WEEK

It has been a very hard working week, but finally and at last, it is Friday again. I've been at school till 6 p.m. today. Afternoon meetings can be very boring and exhausting sometimes or , at least, they are the task I like the least in my job. Instead, I love the class work, especially teaching literature to my eldest students. We are reading pages from Mary Shelley' s FRANKENSTEIN these days. They seem to enjoy and appreciate it very much . Some of them told me they'll try to read the whole novel  or to watch a film  adaptation. This is the aspect of my job I love the most. If you are interested in Gothic Novels, I've posted several materials and suggestions for my students on LEARNONLINE.

2. BOOK GIVEAWAY AT ANECA'S WORLD: I WON!

I've never, never in my life, won anything and in the last two weeks I have, instead and surprisingly, won two books. You can't imagine how happy I am, especially since I really love books! Thanks to Ana T. and her beautiful blog, ANECA'S WORLD, which  I regularly follow, I've won THE SINFUL LIFE OF LUCY BURNS.

 It sounds rather Faustean... Read what it is about...

Lucy Burns wants a normal life: friends, love, and a family of her own. And she could have it all if only she could break free from the job she hates.

That job? Facilitator to hell. And her boss is a real devil.

At the age of eleven, to save her sister’s life, Lucy writes a desperate letter to “To Whom It May Concern,” but when He writes back, Lucy is bound for life. There are perks, sure—she’s ageless, she’s beautiful, and she can eat as much chocolate as she wants and never get fat—but there are also consequences.

She can never see her family again. She can never have a boyfriend. She must spend her life leading sinners to their demise.

After nineteen years of doing the Devil’s dirty work, Lucy wants out, but it all seems hopeless until Teddy Nightingale, her easy listening music idol, gives her the answer: a little-known loophole.

If she succeeds, Lucy gets love, happiness, and everything she ever really wanted. But the consequences? They’re considerably worse than death. To make it through, Lucy must decide what is evil and what is good, what is right and what is wrong, and if, in the end, there’s ever any way to truly know.

3. A NEW PERIOD DRAMA ON ITALIAN TV

Sort of miracle, indeed. Italian TV rarely tries to offer its audience this kind of productions. This week, instead, on CANALE 5, a commercial TV channel, they started broadcasting a new 6-part series titled THE FALCON AND THE DOVE, loosely based on Stendhal's novella THE ABBESS OF CASTRO (1839). First of all, I haven't seen the first episode yet, I just recorded it in order to see it at the weekend. I really didn't have time to do it till now. I can just tell you what I've read about it. It is set at the beginning of the 16th century in the centre of Italy, in the papal lands. In those hard years, Italy was a land of conquest and the scene of bloody civil wars. But of course, though it was a time when women couldn't choose the man to marry or couldn't marry the man whom they loved, a beautiful romance is  the main feature of this period drama: a noble young woman falls in love with an extremely handsome and brave man of humble origin and they have to face her family violent objections. Their love will be hardly put to the test.

4. SPOOKS 8 IS ABOUT TO START ON BBC 1

For those who visit my blog from time to time it is no news: I love SPOOKS. I've always loved this series, even before the arrival of Richard Armitage as Lucas North in the series. I've seen every and each episode since it started and now I've just read that series 8 is going to start on Thursday 29 October. I hope I will be able to see it as soon as possible. I can't wait!

Meanwhile, I can just read the first interviews and articles coming out which many kind bloggy friends of mine have scanned and posted or linked.

For the latest articles and interviews have a look at  Annette's site http://www.richardarmitageonline.com/

CLICK HERE and HERE

VICTORIAN MIST - DESPERATE ROMANTICS

What happens when you study Art and Literature and you are told that “the Pre-Raphaelites were a group of painters and poets who attempted to introduce into visual art, not only the qualities of medieval Italian painting, but a concern with naturalistic accuracy of detail and by the 1850s what is associated with Pre-Raphaelite painting had become its dominant feature: the merely decorative neo-medievalism, subjectivity dreaminess , the morbid and languid sensuousness”?

You - 20 something and a bit bored - imagine them like this ...

 Later on - not 20 something anymore – the same “you” plays a DVD titled DESPERATE ROMANTICS and discovers that they - the Pre Raphaelites - might have been ... different.  They might have been rebellious lively young men like this one…

Certainly, that "you" starts

1.    reappraising those figures as less boring human beings

2.  thinking that her English Literature teacher was not that wrong when she said they were very revolutionary young guys and their art was innovative, though rooted in the past

3.   then she regrets her being rather incredulous and even a bit bored then!

She preferred Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Victorian novelists much more than that painter/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“half Italian – half mad”) and his sister Christina!

Joking , of course, though something not very dissimilar happened to me watching DESPERATE ROMANTICS, 2009 BBC 6-part series, broadcast last summer on BBC2 , now available on DVD . Those brand new DVDs were just there waiting to be seen to bring me back to my beloved university years but with a different, totally different, spirit.

Not that I consider this series perfect or that I particularly liked it, nor that it is an accurate historical reconstruction of the events. What I recognized in it is that, it is, indeed , a lively tale of those young revolutionary artists’ lives and loves (sexual affairs?), which can really make you sympathize with them and their art.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti has the saucy , wild, charming look of Aidan Turner (above and left); John Everett Millais, the sweet, naive - quite feminine - features of Samuel Barnett (below, on the right) . The two are,  with Rafe Spall as William Holman Hunt, the most important members of the PRE-RAPHAELITES BROTHERHOOD. There is a fourth member, Fred Halter, not a painter but a hanger, who is fictional and is a blend of several historical figures who were round the brotherhood.

I’ve watched the 6 episodes in three different stages - it took me more than I thought, since I  expected only 4 episodes – and particularly liked the first three ones. I’d have avoided all those explicit sex scenes and references and would have cut several repetitive moments, such as some arguments among the 4 mates or  between the different couples of lovers, despite them being quite amusing. It is not that I felt offended, I’m not so prudish, and I perfectly know about the scandalous love triangles of those painters with their models which became the subject of much gossip among their contemporaries, particularly as these relationships often crossed the class barriers of polite Victorian society. I would only have cut some of them, unnecessary ones.

My favourite character was, of course, charming seducer Rossetti, so incapable of being faithful, so passionate in his ways, so fascinatingly imperfect and ingenuous, smart and mischievious. I can’t believe he painted this

………… or this……….

But he did.

Now I don't want to give away too much, so that if you can or want to watch the series, you won't find too many spoilers in my review. Anyhow,  if you are interested, click on the  links above the images below and you will read very detailed reviews of each episode. If you don't feel like reading, just have a look at these beautiful caps.

EPISODE 1

EPISODE 2

EPISODE 3

EPISODE 4

EPISODE 5

EPISODE 6

Many are the Victorian historical figures featured in this period drama apart from the Pre-Raphaelites themselves. Among the others,  Charles Dickens, John Ruskin (Millais married Mrs Ruskin after her previous marriage was annulled), and William Morris ( Rossetti had an affair with his wife).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Millais declared their irreverent genius to the Victorian artistic establishment as frequently and as loudly as they could and they have  left us their wonderful refined art which paved the way to the Aesthetic Movement of the end of the century. One work for all by John Everett Millais ...

Ophelia's Death

If you want to see and to know more about the Pre-Raphaelites, visit http://www.preraphaelites.org/

RELATED SITES OR POSTS

BBC DESPERATE ROMANTICS

BBC PRESS OFFICE PACK

A SURPRISING SATURDAY POSTING

1. A NEW WELCOME ACQUISITION

Surprise! Surprise! This morning  the postwoman didn't simply left our mail but called me outside to be sure   I received a parcel from the States. What was it ? The first book (thing) I have ever won in my life. I wrote about my winning a giveaway at Ms Lucy's blog, ENCHANTED BY JOSEPHINE, some time ago and, at last, Michelle Moran's CLEOPATRA'S DAUGHTER is on my bookshelf. I am so proud of it. It has a wonderful cover and came directly from Ms Moran, the author, with a dedication to me (!!!) on the first page. Great!

2. A NEW AWARD

Surprise, surprise, surprise! I was awarded the wonderful Great Look Award by Heather at GOFITA's PAGES. Thank you so such, Heather! It is the second award I receive from you! Thank you so much!  But, enthusiasm apart,  I must say that Heather is facing a problem in these days and has stopped blogging to take care of her baby boy who is in hospital. I wish her and her little son the best and send her a big hug. I'm sure everything will be ok very soon.

Now, to go back to this award,  Heather wrote  that it is meant to pat on the back the ones paying particular attention to their blog presentation.

I'm flattered,  but I'm not that satisfied with the look of my blog...So I'm glad to pass the award  along to bloggers who really have good-looking sites, in my opinion. God knows some of them look awesome! Of course none of them are pretty empty shells, so there’s no shame to mention how nice their blogs are!

HERE WE GO THEN:

1. LIGHTS, CAMERA...HISTORY!

2. THE BOOK GIRL

3. ENCHANTED SERENITY OF PERIOD FILMS

4. ENCHANTED BY JOSEPHINE

5. LA MIA BIBLIOTECA ROMANTICA

Here are the rules:

1. Post the award on your blog, with the name of the person who has granted the award, and his or her blog link.

2. Pass the award to 5 other blogs that your particularly like. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

3. RICHARD ARMITAGE' S LATEST INTERVIEW

Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise! It is on line and it was such fun to read it. I've seen it on several blogs already,  so it is  no news, I know. I just wanted to mention it in my exceptionally- full -of -surprises Saturday posting.  Allison Pearson is a journalist and a writer who is also a great fan of  RA so ... her report is not at all objective or professional... but so amusing! I particularly loved some passages:

(1)"Is Richard Armitage a reluctant Love God? In truth, would this superb actor rather play Richard The Third at Stratford than have besotted women sending him chocolate underpants through the post?

On a warm, late-summer's day I was sent to south-east London, to the set of the new series of Spooks, to find out. Sorry, ladies, it's a tough job, but someone had to go it alone.


So, Mr Love God, how would you describe your own romantic history?


He laughs nervously. 'Er, sparse.'

Sparse? Oh, Richard.

'OK, frugal,' he tries again.


FRUGAL? That's even worse!


"Sparing. Cautious. Careful,' he says carefully. When he looks at me, those pale blue eyes are glinting with merriment.


Hell's bells, man. A sparing, frugal, careful romantic history. It's not very Sexiest Man on Two Legs, is it?

'No, it's just quite old-fashioned, that's all,' he says. 'I don't put it about. Never have. I'm a late developer in everything. I have a fast mind and fast metabolism, and I'm an intense worker, but in terms of life development I'm way behind.'

(2)"For this new series of Spooks, he has put some of the weight back on. He looks burnished and indecently handsome, although in his head he says he's still the geeky Richard that his mates got round to lay their laminate flooring when he was between acting jobs, which he was for so many years.

You know, I wonder if being a late starter isn't the key to Armitage's vast appeal. By the time we first clapped eyes on him as John Thornton, he was already a proper grown man, in sharp contrast to all those snub-nosed pretty boys who pass for movie stars these days. Richard Armitage reminds you of those calm, classic leading men of the 1940s and 1950s - the men with the depths below the still waters".

(3)"It can't be easy for this faintly old-fashioned Northern bloke to find he is male totty. Status based on good looks feels undeserved, and Armitage is big on needing to earn what you get. Some of the vanity of his profession makes him wince. For example, he has a horror of walking down the red carpet.

He says he took the Tube to his first film premiere and was amazed to come round the corner in Leicester Square wearing his tux and discover that you were supposed to arrive by car. "

I must have said it already somewhere here in my blog, Richard being himself is his  best performance to me. Not a hero, but a hard-working, modest, old-fashioned,  extremely charming good man. This interview just  confirms my idea of the man Richard.

You can  see and read a printed version of the interview HERE

or an online version HERE

A WONDERFUL  SATURDAY NIGHT TO YOU ALL!!!

EASY VIRTUE

If you feel  in a blue mood and like comedy, period drama and Colin Firth... well... watching EASY VIRTUE (Un matrimonio all'inglese)will work for you, just as it worked for me last night. This liberal adaptation of Noel Coward's play on the hypocrisy of English high society in the 1920s brought , in fact, a bubbly dose of humour to my otherwise sad end-of-a-hard-working day. Ben Barnes and Colin Firth worked first time together in this 2008 movie that was presented in last year Rome Film Festival. Ben is Colin's naive and good-looking son in this comedy. Their second experience together is, of course, for  Oliver Stones "The Picture of Dorian Gray", recently released (not yet in Italy). I particularly loved the locations, the brilliant cast of protagonists and the costumes. Directed by Australian Stephan Elliott.

THE STORY

Larita, a fascinating American widow, a free-spirit and a successful racecar driver (Jessica Biel), meets young John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) in Monaco. They marry, and he takes his bride home to meet his family at their impossibly large rural mansion, where seven generations of Whittakers have been gentleman farmers. There she meets her icy cold mother-in-law, Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas) and disheveled, sad-eyed father-in-law, Major Jim Whittaker (Colin Firth).

Veronica immediately  dislikes her new daughter-in-law and  is even more disappointed to find that she is a brash American who, like  her husband the Major, speaks fluent French. Larita also meets John's former girlfriend and neighbour Sarah Hurst (Charlotte Riley), who is gracious about the marriage. Larita remains calm in the face of her new mother-in-law's disdain, even admitting to being previously married. Veronica feels that John will soon tire of his wife and that the marriage will end in divorce. She works on making Larita unhappy, while making John content to stay.

Time passes, and to Larita's disappointment, John is not eager to leave the estate so that they can find a home of their own. Larita is bored and miserable in the countryside and hates blood sports like hunting. She reads Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, which shocks her husband's female relatives, and she doesn't want to play tennis. She also dislikes Veronica's stuffy decor, her constant entertaining of her stuffy friends and the overcooked food. Worse still, she suffers from hay fever. She tries to get along with her mother-in-law, but Veronica refuses to accept her and resents her attempts to bring some fresh air into the situation.

Larita makes some inadvertent and extremely hilarious- gaffes:  accidentally kills the family chihuahua, gives some joking advice to the younger daughter, Hilda (Kimberley Nixon), that unfortunately results in embarrassment to, and enmity from, both John's sisters.  Larita finds herself increasingly isolated and demoralized by her mother-in-law's derision, verbal attacks and dirty tricks. Larita's only sympathetic friends are the Major and the servants, whom she treats better than does Veronica.

The Whittaker estate has fallen on hard times. Larita's handsome and charming young husband, once in the shadow of his dragon-lady mother, loses his independence and seems immature to her as he is drawn into family life. In addition, John's affection for Larita seems to be waning, as complains about his wife to Sarah, who finds his overture inappropriate. When John learns how bad the financial situation is for the family, his sense of responsibility to his family brings him closer to his mother and drives a wedge between him and his wife, as his mother had hoped.

For the rest and the end of the story, I'm afraid, you'll have to watch the movie or search somewhere else. I'll stop here. Just a clue...Colin Firth/ the Major  isn't a total loser - a friend of mine suggested- like his characters in The English Patient or Shakespeare in love...True!!! The character of the Major, he interprets wonderfully, is very appealing. Still reeling from losing all his men in the war, the Major has lost interest in his home, and there is no love between him and his wife. He is a sardonic, skeptical, solitary man now. But... not forever ...

OFFICIAL TRAILER

A WUTHERING WEEKEND

Emily Bronte was a clergyman’s daughter. She grew up in a remote part of England. She didn’t like to travel. When she left home she became ill. She never married and she died at the age of 30 having published her only novel and some poetry. It was one of the most shocking novel in English literature. When it was first published 1847, it created a firestorm of protest. It was called one of the most repellent book ever published. One critic said it should be burnt. The protest only settle down when the second edition came out and the author was revealed to be the daughter of a parson from west-Yorkshire. How had a parson’s daughter created such a threat to civilized society as Heathcliff, a   hero driven by sexual passion and vengeance and instead of a proper Victorian heroine she gave the world a married woman who runs around on the moor in her nightgown with her lover. The reading public was shocked. Shocked. But the novel has never been out of print and has had many film/ TV adaptations. WUTHERING HEIGHTS. (from Masterpiece Classic presentation)

I’ve re-watched all the film/TV adaptations I’ve got in my DVD collection in order to compare and decide which one I liked best.

1. Wuthering Heights film 1992 starring Juliette Binoche (Catherine Earnshaw), Ralph Fiennes (Heathcliff)  with Jeremy Northam (Hindley Earnshaw)

2. Wuthering Heights Tv movie 1998 starring Orla Brady and  Robert Cavanagh with Matthew MacFadyen and Sarah Smart

3. Masterpiece Classic 2009 two-part series WUTHERING HEIGHTS with Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley, Andrew Lincoln

4. SPARKHOUSE, Sally Wainwright ‘s BBC drama (2003), inspired to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights  starring Sarah Smart, Joe McFadden and Richard Armitage

It has been a real marathon, full of passion and fury, tragedy and romance. This is one of the stories I’ve loved reading the most and which most move me to tears each time.
I first thought I could have used this post as one of the entries for my PERIOD DRAMA CHALLENGE  in the section VICTORIAN MIST but then I decided this story is absolutely non-Victorian, in spite of the date of its publication. It is Romantic in its mood; it has  a Byronic hero as its male protagonist and  a totally atypical female protagonist, too wild and passionate, too free and self-determined to embody the Victorian "angel of the hearth". Wuthering Heights is terribly modern in its originality. Impossible to label it  in a definite genre. What I am sure of  is that it is not Victorian.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS 1992

The most grey and bleak of the three adaptations I saw. Quite accurately based on the original text, it starts with a female figure wandering on the moors and revisiting the story she has heard about and decided to write: Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s tragic love story. It’s the first WUTHERING HEIGHTS I saw and the one I’m more affectionate to. Some details are given for granted but those who well know the story don’t need them to catch the dramaticity and beauty of these beloved characters and of their doomed lives. Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are absolutely convincing.


WUTHERING HEIGHTS TV movie 1998

Not so different in its structure from the 1992 film, some scenes are pretty similar. Still very near to the original text. Not exceptionally good. I don’t particularly like the two actors starring as the two unfortunate lovers. It has received much interest later on, after Pride and Prejudice 2005 was released, when a huge number of new Darcy’s fans started looking for more Matthew Macfadyen’s work. He is, in fact, in this movie as handsome Hareton, Hindley Earnshaw ’s son.


WUTHERING HEIGHTS- Masterpiece Classic 2009

Of course the script writers had to adapt this story for modern American and European modern  audience and they changed a good deal of details though substantially the plot is the one we very well know. I appreciated the effort to popularize such a classic novel but I must admit I don’t think it was so necessary to add violence to already violent characters like Heathcliff or Hindley and neither to show what happened in a "marital bed" (Shakespeare?) at night in those years, too. I loved the costumes and the locations of this Masterpiece Classic version.  (CLICK to see a BEHIND THE SCENES VIDEO)

SPARKHOUSE 2003

Just "inspired" to Wuthering Heights, SPARKHOUSE tells the story of contemporary teenagers. Carol lives at run-down Sparkhouse Farm with her drunken, abusive father, Richard (Alun Armstrong), and younger sister, Lisa. Across the valley live the middle-class Lawtons - Andrew, and his parents Paul and Kate. Carol and Andrew have been inseparable since childhood. At the beginning of the drama, they are 18 and passionately in love, a love that is raw, urgent and powerful. Carol is feisty and reckless, a young woman who is mistrusted and disliked by Andrew's parents who try to keep them apart. The only place they can be together is a ruined farmhouse up on the moors.

John Standring (Richard Armitage) works at Sparkhouse Farm. Loyal, hard-working, and painfully shy, he loves Carol. At first only a peripheral character, he gradually moves towards the centre of the drama.
The story covers approximately 5 years, and follows Carol and Andrew's attempts to be together in spite of numerous obstacles.

Just a curiosity, Sarah Smart interpreted Catherine Linton in Wuthering Heights 1998 and in Sparkhouse is, instead, the female protagonist, Heathcliff 's counterpart in this modern drama.

(Sarah as Cathy Jr in 1998)

(Sarah as Carol in 2003)

UNFORGETTABLE QUOTES (from 1998 adaptation) AND SCENES (from 1992 film)

1. Catherine is talking about her intention to accept Edgar Linton's marriage proposal to Nellie, her old faithful maid servant:

“If Heathcliff and I married we should be beggars. Whereas if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise and place him out of my brother’s power.”

“That’s a terrible reason for marrying Linton”


“It’s the best reason. I do love Edgar. But my love for him is like …is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it. But my love for Heathcliff is like the eternal rocks beneath. Nellie, I am Heathcliff. He is always, always in my mind. Not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

2. Catherine is dying and asks Heathcliff forgiveness for marrying Linton . He answers:


“I forgive what you’ve done to me. I love my murderer. But yours…How can I?”

3. After Catherine’s death, Heathcliff is desperate and shouts:

“I pray one prayer. I repeat till my toungue stiffens. Catherine Earnshaw may you not rest as long as I am living. Haunt me! Take any form, drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul”.

YES !!! I KNOW IT IS TERRIBLY SAD. BUT I LOVE CRYING ON THESE EXTREMELY MOVING PASSIONATE SCENES. AM I THE ONLY ONE?

P.S. I have - but did not want to re-watch - an Italian  adaptation of Wuthering Heights (RAI 2004).

Can you imagine why? Too many changes, too many cuts. It's a total re-invention of the story as it happened with the latest Italian DAVID COPPERFIELD. Fortunately, I can watch movies and drama coming from Britain. They still seem to respect their classics. What about the new EMMA? Have you seen the first episode?