Sony Pictures Television’s TriStar is adapting Laurie Fabiano’s bestselling 2010 historical novel Elizabeth Street for television, with Edoardo Ponti (The Life Ahead) attached to direct and executive produce. Tyler Hisel (Treadstone, Wayward Pines) has written a pilot for the project, based on Fabiano’s own great-grandmother’s epic struggles.

Elizabeth Street is set in New York’s Little Italy at the dawn of the 20th century. It follows Giovanna Pontillo, an Italian immigrant reeling in the wake of personal tragedy. Arriving in America, her survival and success on the streets of Old New York soon draws the unwanted attention of the notorious Black Hand, the earliest form of the Italian-American Mafia.