Torino

Torino is the city Gallante Selvi presents as the destination of an important stained-glass commission, but it remains a place of announced plans rather than narrated arrival. The proposed journey establishes Selvi’s public image as an ambitious artist; his decision to stay in Pescara for Violetta, and his later departure with her, makes Torino a measure of the distance between that image and his actions.

The proposed commission

Selvi tells Violetta’s father that an earthquake in Torino has loosened an ancient stained-glass triptych from its frame at the Cathedral of the Virgin Martyrs, sending it to the ground in pieces. He describes the loss as a great artistic tragedy and casts himself as the person best suited to replace it. The new work, he says, will honor Santa Lucia, who gouged out her eyes to fend off a rapist and preserve her purity. The account makes the commission sound both prestigious and morally elevated, while Selvi’s extended self-presentation prompts Violetta’s father to ask what it has to do with his daughters.

A destination set aside

Selvi says he will soon leave Pescara for Torino and spend a year or more designing and executing the triptych. But after discovering in Violetta the face of Santa Lucia, he changes his plans and announces that he will stay in Pescara through September. Instead of beginning work in Torino, he meets Violetta each morning at Ciccolina’s cottage and takes her to the sea, where he poses and paints her in linen, lace, or sackcloth. Torino therefore becomes the unrealized destination against which his new artistic and personal fixation is measured.

The promised return

On October 1, Selvi leaves Pescara with Violetta and two portfolios of the drawings and paintings he has made of her. Later, after Ciccolina’s death, he sends instructions that Prosperine should continue maintaining his godmother’s house and butcher business. He says he will return to Pescara after the solstice, pay Violetta’s father for her services, and paint colored glass in Pescara’s summer light, which he claims is unmatched elsewhere in Italy. The account does not establish that he fulfills this promise. Torino remains the commission he invoked but did not undertake, while Pescara is the place to which he claims he will return.