A title that reminds me of Anna and the King, a beautiful film that tells the story of a teacher invited to court in an Oriental Kingdom to become the teacher of the king's children.
And that's how my 72-hour story with Jennie, a crew of 35 Koreans and the Disney+ production of My name is Maria began.
And I was the teacher invited by the king (queen) to tell my life experience.
It all started with a Korean production looking for a farm run by a mother and a young daughter. They selected Donna Vittori thanks to the social communication of my daughter Maria (the Italian one) who is a perfectionist of aesthetics in the Eastern sense of the term, where aesthetics is considered a form of well-being of the senses.
The episode My name is Maria is part of the Korean series My name is Gabriel, where an oriental VIP lives the life of another person of the same age in another part of the world for 72 hours. For Jennie they had selected a farmhouse in Italy; and this choice alone is significant for understanding the new image of Italy abroad.
I won’t dwell on the daring arrival of the first Korean crew that had to choose the location, I’ll just say that they asked us: “How many does Maria have? Do you have a vegetable garden? Do you give cooking experiences to tourists? Do you have hospitality? Do you have a nice garden? What do you grow?”. And finally they asked us: “Do you have mosquito nets on the windows?”.
Maria had just had the garden tidied up and mosquito nets put on the windows (that’s destiny!) so we answered ‘yes’ to all their requests.
A month passed during which Maria interacted with the directors (there were 5 directors) on a daily basis to show all the opportunities for filming on location outside so that they could choose the most intriguing ones. They complimented the professionalism of communication and PR and so we were selected.
The writers had several options for filming during the reality show, because there was a lot of spontaneity in everything Jennie and I did, but they always had one fixed point: the Colleferro market.
Colleferro is unable to give a modern dimension to its market, it has tried many times with architectural interventions that however have not succeeded in either returning it to the initial spirit of a farmers' market that is a point of convergence of small producers, nor in transforming it into a receptive point of social aggregation (probably the target audience of the users had not been well selected).
But one thing is certain: markets in the center of cities work when there are tourists. And the Korean Disney+ production entitled My name is Maria looked at Italy from a tourist perspective as well. It must also be said that the people and operators of the Colleferro market were splendid and full of joy and pride in showing 'their market'.
We only found out the name of the protagonist a few hours before her arrival when the Italian SEO manager (a pure Milanese with Korean parents) told us that she was a girl with 85 million followers on Instagram: Jennie from BlackPink.
For those of my age, the name didn't mean much, for me she was a young oriental girl who had worldwide success that gave her a lot but also took a lot away from her.
For me, it was a gift and a great opportunity to let all her fans know the most beautiful part of Italy, our country.
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