Concettina Tempesta’s cleft lip

Concettina Tempesta’s cleft lip is identified at birth, as she survives the delivery in which her twin brother is stillborn. The scene presents the physical difference alongside maternal tenderness and family grief, while later recollection shows how the birth becomes entangled with competing ideas of miracle and superstition.

Birth and Recognition

Concettina is the surviving twin of Ignazia Tempesta’s delivery. Domenico Tempesta holds the dead boy while the living child’s umbilical cord is cut; Prosperine identifies the newborn as a girl, and the doctor observes that she is a redhead and has a harelip. The narrative thus records the cleft lip in the same moment that establishes the stark contrast between the twins: one is born dead, the other alive.

Ignazia strains to see her daughter and responds with visible love, despite her distress at the birth. Her reaction places the child’s bodily difference within a scene of attachment rather than rejection. The evidence establishes how the cleft lip is recognized, but does not describe treatment or its later effects on Concettina’s life.

The Birth as a Question of Meaning

In a later recollection of having midwifed the twins, Prosperine asks Domenico what the birth means: the boy came out dead, and the girl was born with what she calls a rabbit’s lip. Her question links the cleft lip to the stillbirth and to the possibility of a miracle, making the children’s birth a subject of interpretation as well as a family crisis.

Domenico rejects Prosperine’s supernatural reading, dismissing belief in miracles and the evil eye as superstition. Prosperine warns him against mocking what he cannot understand. The exchange does not resolve what the birth means; instead, it shows how the same circumstances provoke sharply different responses, with the cleft lip serving as one concrete detail in a larger dispute about signs, belief, and misfortune.