The first episode of My Brilliant Friend is likely to cause both great excitement and deep anxiety. Excitement because Ferrante is a writer with an almost evangelical following. Her quartet of “Neapolitan novels” have sold close to a million copies in the UK, and 1.8m in Italy. When readers finish one book, they tend to devour all four, mesmerised by the taut depiction of a poor suburb and its characters over the course of many decades. But that invented world of a few families living cheek-by-jowl in postwar Italy is both exotically foreign and yet - with its universal themes of poverty, violence, alliances and aspiration – astonishingly familiar. The anxiety arises because the adaptation might erase not only how we’ve imagined the characters, but also their world.

Elisabetta Salvini, a feminist historian at the University of Parma, says that Ferrante “knows how to use perfectly the history of our country, weaving it into the depth and complexity of her characters.” For Adalgisa Giorgio, herself Neapolitan and a senior lecturer in Italian studies at the University of Bath, the friendship depicted in the books “is full of conflict and confrontation, but it’s the basis of their resistance to a world which tries to erase them.”

Yet, while Ferrante has become a subject of university study in the UK, there’s more reticence, even snootiness, about her in Italian academic circles. Here, realist plots are often less valued than experimental, highbrow works and some intellectuals sense something soap opera-ish about Ferrante. One Italian literary critic, Stefano Jossa, wrote a polemic recently under the provocative headline: “Ferrante shouldn’t be studied at university”. If she’s going to be studied, he wrote, it should be to analyse and deconstruct the mythography, not to add to it.

Pure grime and grit in Matteo Garrone’s 2008 film Gomorrah. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

So for all those reasons there’s huge anticipation surrounding this adaptation. Ferrante herself was a script adviser and the director Saverio Costanzo said recently that working with the famous recluse was like “working with a ghost”. But Costanzo probably felt he was working with many other ghosts beyond Ferrante, because the artistic ancestors of this production are the country’s great neorealist directors: De Sica, Visconti, Rossellini and Fellini. Like them, Costanzo has cast many non-professional actors and sought to portray the rawness of the postwar period with all its destitution and opportunities, with its clash of ancient and modern. There are dusty fields, abandoned buildings, stray dogs, goatherds and only one or two cars. The Neapolitan dialect is so thick that there are subtitles even for Italians.

But those neorealist directors were invariably portraying and interpreting their own present, whereas this adaptation is a costume drama. The set was built from scratch and it appears strangely spacious and – a word one would never normally associate with Naples – neat. The city is noisy, frenetic, creative and soiled, so the bare set is unsettling, but that was precisely Costanzo’s intention: “A reconstructed set,” he told me, “creates disorientation in the spectator.”

Of course, international audiences (this is a co‑production with HBO) demand Italianate style: cypress groves and white marble. Inspector Montalbano is so successful, one suspects, less because it’s noir than because it offers the opposite: sunlit escapism. Two Italian Oscar-winners even spaded the aesthetic into their titles (The Great Beauty and Life Is Beautiful) and duly stylised or glamorised despair. Italian directors often struggle to do pure grime or grit: Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah and Dogman) is one of the few who comes close to Ken Loach.

Multilogue in Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). Photograph: Ronald Grant

Another challenge has been how to recreate Italian “multilogue” on screen. Here, conversation is often about interruption, interjection. That’s why, say, the scene of the family lunch in Fellini’s Amarcord feels so familiar, because everyone is shouting at once and no one quite understands what’s going on. But today’s popular co‑produced TV dramas don’t allow for that realistic disorientation. The viewer must never be bewildered. So scripts are honed and polished across continents, with the result that Italian verbal chaos gives way to something more restrained.

But as the series progresses, the neighbourhood fills out, the infants mature, the young girls become teenagers and their life choices, about boys and schools, take on greater significance. The novel has often been described as a bildungsroman, and seeing it on screen is a reminder of how great Italians are at that coming-of-age genre – I’m Not Scared, Cinema Paradiso, even Pinocchio. Perhaps it’s because the freedom and creativity of children is encouraged. But the genre is also powerful here because childhood can be surrounded by menace: innocence is cherished precisely because its backdrop is organised crime.

There’s nothing new about seeing portrayals of the Italian mafia on film, but rarely has it seemed so organic as it does here. The Camorra (the Neapolitan mafia) is barely mentioned; the violence is menacing because it isn’t an exception, but part of a continuum. As Ferrante writes in the book: “Blows were given and received. Men returned home embittered by their losses, by alcohol, by debts, by deadlines, by beatings, and at the first inopportune word they beat their families, a chain of wrongs that generated wrongs.” In this adaptation, fathers scream at their wives and daughters: “I’ll smash your face”; or: “I’ll break your thighs.” There are more fists than pistols.

Visions of innocence … Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988). Photograph: Allstar/Miramax/Sportsphoto Ltd

The feminist pushback against that domestic and sexual violence is more explicit than in the books. So too is the centrality of storytelling: Lila makes up stories (“The Blue Fairy”). The girls cuddle up and read Little Women together. There’s still a notion that this is a story about stories, which is, after all, what Life Is Beautiful and Cinema Paradiso are also about: portrayals of our fantasies, and also – through censorship and human erasure – what we exclude.

But here this is not a postmodern game. That centrality of storytelling is a metaphor for potential and empowerment. Lenù says, at one point, that she feels herself “immersed in” a novel and that awareness allows her to narrate her life, even to make it up and be in control of it. Despite the claustrophobia and violence, and despite the uncertainty of her future (it’s no coincidence that she mispronounces “oracle” in class), she (Elena) is able to open up her future through eduction. Her books will take her much further than the shoes Lila makes.

That tension between going far and staying put, between being cosmopolitan or rooted, is a universal theme. But it’s even more keenly felt in Italy, where Italians celebrate and bemoan the country’s extraordinary provincialism: that’s what makes the country, they say, both so charming and so small-minded. The social fabric is beautifully woven but never shredded, so people stay home and things stay forever the same. Thus courageous Lila unexpectedly turns back when the girls play truant to glimpse the sea. She “wanted to return to the confines of the neighbourhood”. Timid Lenù, by contrast, wants to leave, but in becoming scholarly is suddenly separated from those she loves: to fit it in, she now has to “suppress myself”

Lenù senses a growing social difference between herself and her friend. She is aspirational where Lila is more fatalistic, saying of her shoes, but also her hopes: “the mind’s dreams have ended up under the feet.”

This analysis of class, and the clash between simplicity and modernity, brings to mind the Italian director Ermanno Olmi, who died in May. His ensemble pieces, often using amateur actors in very humble settings, were moving but never mawkish. His The Tree of Wooden Clogs, incidentally, is Loach’s favourite film. The greatest compliment one could give this adaptation is that, perhaps, Olmi is the true ghost that haunts it •

My Brilliant Friend will be broadcast on Sky Atlantic from Monday at 9pm.