Amore

Amore in the novel is more than a declaration of feeling: it is a force that overwhelms the body, unsettles moral certainty, and makes demands on how people treat one another. Donna Fedele Vayla argues that love cannot be reduced to cowardice or insult, while her own past and Lelia Camin’s divided desires show how love can also wound, provoke self-destruction, and collide with obligations that affection alone cannot resolve. Through Donna Fedele Vayla, Lelia Camin, and Massimo Alberti, the novel tests the difference between passion as an absolute present and love that must answer to time, faith, and care for another person.

Love as an Absolute

At Arsiero station, Donna Fedele Vayla challenges Massimo Alberti’s apparent retreat from Lelia Camin. She calls him a child who does not yet understand love, insisting that genuine love cannot be dismissed as cowardice or treated as an insult. Her claim is not an abstract maxim detached from experience: as Massimo leaves by train, she remembers a moment in the woods at Lavarone when she could have given herself to Marcello Trento, forgetting everything. The memory returns not as a distant recollection but as a vivid, bodily resurgence of youth, love, sweetness, and terror; then it passes. Her conviction about love is therefore shadowed by the knowledge that feeling can remain powerful even when the moment for acting on it has gone.

Donna Fedele Vayla turns that conviction into an intervention. She follows Massimo to the station and tells him that Lelia Camin loves him, though Lelia has only almost admitted it. The scene makes love legible not through a formal confession but through another person’s recognition of what has been nearly spoken. Donna Fedele Vayla’s act does not settle the couple’s difficulties, but it refuses to let hesitation stand in for a final judgment on their feelings.

Donna Fedele Vayla’s Past

In recalling her own life, Donna Fedele Vayla describes love as a source of both religious crisis and renewed belief. At eighteen, she fell in love with a man who was not free. She loved him with her whole being, but he did not return her passion and silently asked her to renounce it. She then considered a death that would appear accidental, imagining a dangerous mountain excursion and a fall so that her father’s grief might be less bitter. Her father’s illness interrupted that plan. Because her mother had died when she was thirteen and her father had no one but her, her love for him returned to the foreground.

During his convalescence, her father spoke to her gently about God, Christ, the soul, suffering, and love. Donna Fedele Vayla recalls that the religious instruction she had received at school had been only a surface coating; it was her father’s tenderness that made her believe with her heart. In this history, love does not simply oppose faith. Her attachment to her father helps draw her back from a passion and a death wish that had overtaken her, and becomes the circumstance through which religious feeling returns.

A second loss complicates that account. After her father died, when she was twenty-seven, Donna Fedele Vayla lived in Turin and moved in society. She became fond of a younger, poor officer of considerable intelligence and moral courage. Believing she might love him in return, she allowed him to hope, but when he asked her to marry him she realized too late that she could offer a bond of the soul but not marriage. She told him so; he left without a word. Lelia Camin asks whether he killed himself, but Donna Fedele Vayla gives no answer. The silence leaves the consequence unresolved, while making clear the weight she attaches to having let him believe in a future she could not share.

Lelia Camin: Passion, Memory, and Crisis

Lelia Camin’s experience of love is entangled with grief and the prospect of death. In a moment of despair, she begins writing to Donna Fedele Vayla that she is going to die, then tears up the note. She changes from the mourning dress borrowed from Donna Fedele Vayla into the gray dress she had worn when she came to the villa. She handles a silver-mesh purse that Andrea Trento had given her, containing a few of his other mementos; a small plate bearing the name Leila recalls an earlier dispute. She hesitates over whether to leave the purse behind, but, after setting it aside, experiences a sudden storm of desire directed toward the man she loves. The shift does not erase Andrea Trento’s place in her memory: she takes the purse again, writes beneath his photograph that she is coming, and leaves it where it will be seen.

The scene gives love a physical and unstable form. Lelia Camin’s desire breaks through a frozen resolve, but it does not arrive as a calm, settled choice between the living and the dead. The purse and photograph remain beside her decision, binding the immediate surge of passion to mourning and to her stated expectation of death. The episode presents neither desire as safely redemptive nor memory as something she can simply put away.

Her response to Massimo Alberti’s letter reveals another tension. He imagines a love that would ask only for love, without a past or a future, in an infinite present of feeling and sensation. Lelia Camin stops at this passage, presses her lips to the page without completing a kiss, and holds the letter beneath her cheek as though time and the movement of the world had stopped. Yet by dawn she fears that Massimo Alberti’s love is about to die. When she rereads the letter, pride returns as anger and as a desire for victory over his contempt and resistance. The same words that first draw her toward him thus become a source of renewed conflict: she desires the absolute present he imagines, but cannot avoid reading it through the history of hurt and the possibility of loss.

Love, Duty, and Practical Choice

The novel places these intense feelings alongside material and familial pressures. After Marcello Trento’s will is opened, Lelia Camin is identified as his universal heir; the agent also reports that her father, Girolamo da Camin, has announced his arrival and that she is twenty years and a few months old. Her inheritance and age are not themselves declarations of love, but they shape the conditions under which she must make choices about home and support. When her father visits Donna Fedele Vayla, his stated humility sits beside a private plan to secure control of the Trento property and obtain favorable terms from creditors. His attachment to Carolina Gorlago further complicates any simple picture of paternal care: he cannot imagine taking Lelia home while keeping Gorlago, and cannot bring himself to dismiss Gorlago either. The narrator describes the pair as sometimes bitterly quarrelsome but unwilling to separate, attached to one another in their own way. That compromised bond stands in marked contrast to the ideal of love as pure, unqualified surrender.

At Valsolda, Donna Fedele Vayla’s care for Lelia Camin takes the form of restraint and practical planning. She decides that Lelia cannot remain there and proposes taking her away, despite Lelia’s plea to stay and her horror at returning to Velo. Donna Fedele Vayla considers the risks of leaving Lelia unsupported in Turin, then arranges for her to stay with her cousin in Santhià if her father permits it. The plan includes a telegram to the cousin, a doctor’s examination before departure, and arrangements for forwarding Lelia’s letters. Even while exhausted and seriously unwell, Donna Fedele Vayla treats Lelia’s safety as a responsibility she cannot set aside. Her love is protective, but it does not merely affirm what Lelia wants in the moment.

The Concept’s Contrasts

Across these histories, Amore encompasses more than the arrival of passion or the achievement of a couple’s union. Donna Fedele Vayla’s remembered love for Marcello Trento survives as a moment she could not act upon; her later affection for the officer is shaped by the harm of allowing hope she could not fulfill. Lelia Camin’s desire for Massimo Alberti erupts amid grief, suicidal thoughts, and suspicion that his feeling may fade. Massimo Alberti, meanwhile, longs for a love beyond past and future, but recognizes that such a dream might be broken by life. Each case sets the ideal of complete surrender against the consequences of time, unequal feeling, and incompatible choices.

The novel also distinguishes love from mere possession or authority. Lelia Camin’s father approaches her inheritance and return home through calculations about property, creditors, and control, while Donna Fedele Vayla’s concern is expressed in arrangements meant to protect Lelia even when Lelia resists them. Love can be absolute in its sensation, yet its ethical meaning appears in what a person does with another’s vulnerability. The novel leaves that tension unresolved: passion may make the present feel limitless, but love also has to confront memory, faith, family claims, and the care that survival requires.