Cannaregio is the Venetian district most closely associated with Archimboldi’s precarious life as a writer and gardener. Its maze of streets and old, leaning houses leads the baroness to his door, where she encounters a man whose austere rooms and silence stand far from the cultivated literary world represented by his publisher, Bubis. The district later becomes the setting for their renewed meeting: a manuscript brings the baroness back to Archimboldi, and their relationship resumes in the familiar terrain of Venice without requiring much explanation between them.

A route through the district

The baroness travels to Archimboldi’s address on Calle Turlona, in Cannaregio, after receiving a letter from her husband. From San Zaccaria she takes a vaporetto along the Grand Canal, gets off by the station, asks for directions, and continues on foot. Her route carries her through a succession of named streets and crossings: along the Lista di Spagna, across the Ponte Guglie, down to the Fondamenta Pescaria, and eventually through Calle Ghetto Vecchio and the Campo Ghetto Nuovo. After crossing another bridge and turning onto the Fondamenta degli Ormesini, she reaches Calle Turlona.

The walk is a passage from the Venice of celebrated writers and elegant terraces into a district that the baroness experiences as difficult to orient herself within. At Archimboldi’s address, the houses seem to prop one another up, while the passageways form a maze. Voices can be heard from a distance, people asking questions and answering with dignity, but the route offers no clear architectural assurance of where one is. The building itself gives no reliable indication whether its inhabitants are on the third floor, the fourth, or what the baroness imagines as the third and a half.

Archimboldi’s apartment and working life

Archimboldi opens the door in a wool sweater and wide, dirt-stained trousers, his long, tangled hair and beard making him an unusual sight in a city of water and stone. The apartment consists of two small rooms divided by a plaster partition and a tiny, recently installed bathroom. Its only window belongs to the room used as both kitchen and dining room and looks onto a canal flowing into the Rio della Sensa. In the second room, where the bed and clothes are kept, the walls and furnishings seem dark mauve shading into black. The modest arrangement makes no attempt to reproduce the polished surroundings of literary society.

The contrast is also a contrast between ways of living. Before reaching Calle Turlona, the baroness has been thinking about Moravia’s worldly hospitality: the view from his terrace, the ruins illuminated by spotlights, and the company of poets, filmmakers, translators, students, aristocrats, and Marxists. Archimboldi, by comparison, appears to her as a man of the lower orders, an artist in a state of permanent incandescence, given to long soliloquies rather than cultivated sociability. In Cannaregio, that literary image becomes materially specific: a small apartment beside a canal, a bed among clothes, and a room without the grand view that organized her thoughts about Moravia.

The district also belongs to Archimboldi’s actual workaday life, not merely to the baroness’s impression of him. He tells her that gardening is his real job, either in Venice’s few but well-tended public parks or in the enclosed inner gardens maintained by private residents and law firms. His life as a published novelist therefore coexists with paid labor in gardens hidden behind palazzo walls. Cannaregio situates him within the city while keeping the gap between his public literary identity and his ordinary means of living in view.

The baroness’s visit

The baroness recognizes that she cannot remember Archimboldi’s eyes, even as she recalls Moravia’s. Her journey thus approaches not a familiar portrait but an uncertain person: she speculates about the voices and figures to which Archimboldi might be speaking in his soliloquies, imagining a dead man, a German demon, or a monster connected with the Von Zumpe estate, before dismissing such thoughts as nonsense. The neighborhood’s winding, indistinct spaces provide no firm answer to those fantasies; the encounter begins instead at a door in a building whose floors are difficult to locate.

Once inside, she and Archimboldi spend the night together. The narration indicates that they talk and make love, while the engineer who accompanied her remains at the Danieli, grows quietly drunk, and does not go to the police. The baroness’s stay is not presented as a rescue or a dramatic contest: she asks few questions and is willing to answer the questions Archimboldi chooses to ask. Their intimacy takes place within the apartment’s confined rooms, while the engineer’s absence leaves the encounter free of any immediate interruption.

Their conversation moves among the practical and the personal. They discuss Archimboldi’s gardening work, the cold he wards off with blankets, American writers published by Bubis whom he has never read, the baroness’s vanished cousin Hugo Halder, and Archimboldi’s family, whom he has finally found. When she is about to ask where and how he found them, he rises and asks her to listen. She hears only silence. He then opens the window and leans partway out, not to throw himself into the canal but to show her the snow falling over Venice. The scene makes the apartment a place where the ordinary view through a window becomes an encounter with silence and weather, without resolving the questions about his family that had been about to surface.

Return to Cannaregio

More than a year after Bubis’s death, the manuscript of Archimboldi’s novel The Return arrives at the publishing house. The Baroness Von Zumpe, now responsible for the publishing business, has no desire to read it and gives it to the copy editor to prepare for publication in three months. She nevertheless sends a telegram to the return address on the envelope and travels to Milan and then Venice. In a trattoria in Cannaregio, she finds Archimboldi and gives him a check covering the new novel’s advance and royalties from his previous books. He puts the respectable sum into his pocket without a word.

Their second meeting is marked by the change of season and by what no longer needs to be said. The snowy winter setting of their earlier visit has given way to the beginning of fall, mild enough that a light sweater suffices. They eat Venetian sardines with slices of semolina, drink white wine, and walk through Venice. The baroness asks whether Archimboldi still lives in Cannaregio. He says that he does, though no longer on Calle Turlona, and mentions that he plans to head south. The answer establishes continuity without suggesting permanence: he remains in the district, but not in the same apartment, and his life is already oriented toward another departure.

Narrative significance

Cannaregio gathers together two different forms of access to Archimboldi. In the first visit, the baroness reaches him by following a physical route through a city whose streets and buildings make orientation uncertain. She finds a private life unlike the polished social world she associates with Moravia: a modest home, gardening work, sparse possessions, and a conversation that turns toward silence. In the later encounter, it is a manuscript and a telegram that bring her back. The district thus links Archimboldi’s literary production to face-to-face contact while preserving the distance between his public identity and the life he leads.

The location also resists becoming a settled home. Archimboldi lives in Cannaregio, changes address within it, and contemplates heading south; his belongings are described elsewhere as few and portable, including a suitcase and Bubis’s typewriter. The district gives the novel a tangible point of return, but not a promise that the writer can be fixed in place. Its cramped rooms and confusing passages make proximity possible, while the canal-facing window, the snow, and the unspoken questions keep the meeting open-ended.