Pescara is Prosperine’s native seaside village and the defining setting of her early life with Violetta D’Annunzio. In the story Prosperine later tells Dominick Birdsey, Pescara is more than a birthplace: its public square, shore, church, and closely watched social life bring friendship, religious ceremony, rumor, violence, and flight into the same small geography. The village is where Prosperine first witnesses the rabbit miracle and where she later risks everything to protect Violetta from Gallante Selvi.

Setting and Daily Life

Prosperine says she was fourteen and living in Pescara when the events she recounts began. She corrects Dominick’s assumption that she was Sicilian: her later association with Sicily came from fleeing Pescara, not from being born there. The village’s ordinary rhythm is organized around work and the midday pause. While Prosperine’s father naps and macaroni dries on racks and trays, Prosperine and her sisters, Anna and Teodolina, can roam the busy square.

Their walks often include Violetta, the younger daughter of a local fishmonger. The girls’ different circumstances are visible in their routines. Anna and Teodolina help with macaroni, and the flour that settles on them through the morning makes them look older; before their walks, they rub olive oil into their hair and skin to clean away the flour. Violetta, who spends her mornings cutting fish for her father, asks Prosperine to brush her long dark hair with tortoiseshell brushes kept in her apron. She also uses lemon to remove the smell of fish from her hands. These repeated preparations make the noon walk a small daily transformation: work gives way to the girls’ time together in the square.

Pescara’s shore and religious life are joined in the annual Feast of the Assumption. When Violetta is fifteen, the village priest selects her to crown the statue of the Blessed Virgin. According to local custom, the statue is carried by horse and carriage from the church down to the shore at low tide, where the sea is blessed for the safety of sailors. Men then carry it in procession back through the square and up the church steps, where parishioners leave offerings and pray for their families. The ceremony places Violetta at the center of a public tradition, making her visible not just to her friends but to the whole village.

Violetta’s Departure and the Village’s Judgment

Violetta leaves Pescara with Gallante Selvi. Her father, fearing the loss of his fish business, spreads a story that the village priest secretly married the couple before their departure; the priest publicly denies it. Violetta’s father then denounces his daughter in the streets, but his business continues to suffer. Before the month is over, he is killed in a tavern brawl. Though Violetta and Selvi are found in Torino and told of the death, Violetta does not return to Pescara for her father’s burial.

The village’s attention does not remain fixed on her. By November, gossip has moved on to other people judged sinful. The pause in talk marks a change in the village’s relationship to Violetta: she remains an object of public judgment, but only until the community finds another subject. Prosperine’s account of Pescara thus gives social reputation a public setting, in the streets and square, while also showing how quickly that attention can shift.

The Rabbit Miracle and Selvi’s Return

In November, Prosperine recalls witnessing a strange event involving a rabbit. Ciccolina, ill and in an irritable mood, has ordered that the animal be cut in half. Prosperine holds it steady while Ciccolina’s cleaver comes down. Instead of dying, the divided animal produces two whole, living rabbits. The marvel takes place within the familiar world of Pescara’s work and village life, but it changes how Prosperine understands what she has seen. Later, the story of rabbits dividing and multiplying becomes part of her account of the birth of twins and the curse she associates with a cleft lip.

Violetta and Selvi eventually return to Pescara. Their arrival at midday draws a crowd, and Selvi presents himself as an artist come back to mourn his godmother and Violetta’s father, and to make a work inspired by the local coast. He speaks publicly about beauty and art, kisses Violetta’s gloved hand, and presents the pair as affectionate. Prosperine recognizes the performance as a lie. Selvi and Prosperine’s father arrange for her to stay at Ciccolina’s house to cook and clean for the visitors; when she objects, her father dismisses her protest rather than changing the arrangement.

Pescara’s public and private spaces reveal different versions of the couple. In the village square Selvi performs respectability before an audience; at Ciccolina’s house, Prosperine sees the contrast between that display and Violetta’s vulnerability. She comforts her friend and decides that Selvi must pay for what he has done. The village setting constrains her choices: a public attack would expose her to arrest, and she is unwilling to abandon Violetta to protect herself. Her response begins with an attempt to use the evil eye against Selvi, then turns to poisoning him. The attempt is discovered, leaving the two women in immediate danger.

Flight and Narrative Significance

Prosperine’s father learns what has happened and warns her to run. He gives her money and embraces her; she remembers the moment as evidence of his love, and says that she forgives him for having sold her away. That last meeting links Pescara both to the hurt in her childhood and to an act of care at the moment she must leave. The two women escape through the woods to the docks, where they rely on Violetta’s charm and Prosperine’s money to persuade fishermen to help them. They travel by boat down the coast, past Bari and Brindisi, and across the Strait of Messina.

Prosperine’s departure explains how she later becomes associated with Sicily: she goes there to hide after the events in Pescara. The village remains the point of origin for the friendship, the rabbit story, and the danger that drives the women away. In the embedded narrative, its compact social world repeatedly brings private choices into public view: Violetta is celebrated in a religious procession, condemned in the streets, and then returned as part of Selvi’s carefully staged image. Prosperine’s account gives Pescara the force of both home and trap—the place she leaves, and the place whose customs, memories, and judgments continue to shape the story she tells.