I saw this film in Argentina where everyone speaks Castilian and alots of folks are Italian descendants.
My wife and I chuckled when a Spanish girl appears there as "Fiamma Coronna" because it sounded too Italian. Then we wondered why the author of the book didn't bother to search a proper Spanish name for that girl. She could be "Florencia de la Corona", "Flor Fernández de la Corona" and so on...
All that is like naming an English girl as "Ragnhild Didriksson".
You're right about it sounding Italian, because Fiamma in the novel is in fact Italian, and hails from there. They changed her nationality for the movie from Italian to Spanish, although I am not clear why.
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You right!! don´t sound spanish because in the book Fiamma is italian and in the movie she is spanish but i can´t understand why change her nationality o why don´t change her name to Fátima Corona that sound more spanish.
Well it's not as if Spain and Italy are hermetically sealed off from one another. They've got quite a bit in common linguistically and culturally. Maybe she has an Italian mother and a Spanish father. Her full is probably a bit longer but gets chopped down for English speakers like Antonio Banderas does with his name.
B/c it was made for an English speaking US/UK audience so perhaps the producers felt that people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I certainly didn't catch the nuance, and I've seen plenty of Spanish and Italian films. :(
Fiamma is my name, Italian born and bred. I know for a fact that my name, which means 'flame' in Italian, is not used in Spain. Plenty of tell tale signs that the character is, in fact, Italian throughout the movie. Her parents send her a box of amaretti, traditional Italian biscuits made with almonds that do not exist in Spain. The postcards intercepted by miss G, although written in Spanish at the back, are pictures of Rome, not Madrid. And Fiamma's book in Di's hands in the final scene is written in Italian.
She is Spanish in the movie probably because the producers thought that it would be more appealing for US audience. Which is honestly a little insulting for a number of reasons. Movie was great though.
It also raised immediate red flags for me when I saw the Colosseum, St Peter's Square etc on the post cards that was supposedly sent from Madrid. As someone who's been to all those places, I was taken aback, "Did they serious just did THAT?" "Did they seriously think the audience is this gullible?"
Unfortunately, they are.
I was in complete shock and paused the movie right there and then and start googling if people caught this massive error/insult, other than a few comments here and there by foreign viewers, it seems that the general (English speaking) public can't differentiate Italy from Spain. This is incredibly insulting for me even when I'm not Italian/Spanish(I'm Chinese).