A thriving industry has sprung up to meet demand: Ferrante tours ranging from half a day to six days take people around the book’s locations, promising an authentic Neapolitan experience. “She told us that many, many people from South America are going around Naples to see places from Elena Ferrante.” In the past few years, thousands of tourists have visited the area because of the book series, a double bildungsroman about a pair of friends which spans the decades between their 50s childhood and the present day. “It was very funny – she recognised every one of them,” says Saverio Costanzo, director of the series. Or, at least, the actors playing these roles in the forthcoming television adaptation of the first novel. One evening, the tourist stopped at a local restaurant for dinner, and, to her surprise, found Elena Greco eating there, along with railroad worker and poet Donato Sarratore and his family.

Perhaps she was thinking of the scenes in the first novel, where Elena leaves home for a few blissful weeks of reading and swimming perhaps of the more dramatic romantic entanglements that happen on the island in the second volume. She was retracing the steps of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, the characters at the centre of the four-book series by Elena Ferrante that begins with My Brilliant Friend. E arlier this year, a Brazilian tourist was wandering around Ischia, a picturesque volcanic island just off the coast of Naples in southern Italy.

My brilliant friend book