It appears another of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novels is coming to life…

ITV Studios-owned Spanish drama house Cattleya Producciones has acquired the rights to the 70-year-old Spanish novelist and journalist’s bestselling novel El Italiano and will adapt it as a miniseries.

Inspired by real events, El Italiano is a story of love, spies and the sea set at the height of World War II in the Bay of Algeciras, where Italian combat divers are causing chaos among the Allied forces.

Arturo Díaz, Managing Director and Executive Producer of Cattleya Producciones, and Ricardo Tozzi, founder and President of Cattleya, are leafing the project.

Cattleya Producciones is searching for an international cast to bring El Italiano‘s Spanish, Italian and English characters to life.

Screenwriter Beto Marini, co-creator of Movistar+ series La Unidad and feature films such as Retribution and Extinction is adapting the story.

Pérez-Reverte was trained in underwater activities at Spain’s Centro de Buceo de la Armada (Navy Diving Center) in Cartagena in the late 1960s and part of El Italiano comes from a story told to him by his father when he was a child.

“I’m positive that this series from Cattleya, whose productions I have always admired for their quality, will be faithful to the story I wrote,” he said.

Pérez-Reverte’s previous work La Reina del Sur (2002), about a Mexican woman who becomes a leader of a drug trafficking cartel in the south of Spain, was adapted into a Spanish-language telenovela starring Kate del Castillo, and later an English-language series (Queen of the South) starring Alice Braga.