Il villino delle spine

Il villino delle spine is Donna Fedele’s rueful name for the villa when its few red roses fall short of the profusion she thinks it deserves. The phrase turns an affectionate complaint about the garden into an image of shelter edged with difficulty: the house is imagined as a nest of roses, yet the chapter bearing this name opens with Lelia Camin fainting and being carried to bed. The contrast gives the expression its force without making the villa either a simple sanctuary or a place of literal danger.

The name and the garden

The expression arises in a conversation about a visit to the small cemetery. Lelia proposes going the following morning with her friend and taking many roses; she would have preferred white ones, but the villa has only a few red blooms. Donna Fedele is dissatisfied with her roses and jokes that the villa deserves to be called Il villino delle spine. She immediately turns the complaint into a plan: the garden needs many more rosebushes, so that the villa appears to rest on a basket of roses and be covered in them up to the roof.

Her answer is practical as well as imaginative. Donna Fedele proposes a trip to Milano to visit florists and select the best plants. Lelia seems pleased, but says she hopes her father will allow it. Her deference surprises Donna Fedele, making the garden exchange register not only as playful talk but also against Lelia’s constrained dependence on parental permission.

A chapter title beside a crisis

Il villino delle spine is also the heading of Chapter 9. Under that heading, Donna Fedele has Lelia, who has fainted, carried into a bedroom with two beds. When Lelia comes to, Donna Fedele dismisses the servants, comforts her, and urges her to lie quietly, saying that she herself needs rest. The scene places the villa’s floral nickname beside an intimate moment of physical vulnerability and care.

The name does not explain the collapse, nor does the evidence make the roses a direct symbol of it. Instead, the chapter title gives the domestic setting a double aspect: the villa is being discussed as a place to beautify and fill with roses, while inside it Donna Fedele attends to a young woman whose distress cannot be resolved by that domestic tenderness alone.

The house as refuge and contested home

The later use of the house’s name sharpens that tension. The narrator calls it Villino delle Rose when Girolamo da Camin arrives there, while Donna Fedele has already warned him that Lelia may refuse to see him. His visit is shaped by his own financial calculations and by the fact that Lelia has inherited the Trento estate; she receives him standing, rigid, and visibly recoils from his kiss. The villa is thus a refuge where she is protected by Donna Fedele, but it is also a place her biological father can enter and where the question of his authority remains unsettled.

Donna Fedele’s later arrangements make the limits of that refuge concrete. After Lelia has gone to Valsolda and Massimo Alberti hopes to obtain a medical post there, Donna Fedele insists that Lelia must leave with her rather than remain in the area. She organizes a possible stay with her cousin in Santhià, subject to her father’s permission, and plans the onward journey to Torino. Across these scenes, the rose-covered villa is less a lasting resolution than a temporary shelter within a continuing conflict over Lelia’s safety, independence, and home.