Jenne

Jenne is identified in Massimo’s account as the place where he first met Benedetto. The novel gives the location significance through this personal connection: it is one point in the story of Benedetto that Massimo later recounts to Marcello and Lelia.

Identity and Setting

The evidence identifies Jenne as a place Massimo had stayed, alongside Rome and Subiaco. It supplies no description of the town or its surroundings; its narrative identity rests on the encounter associated with it.

Massimo and Benedetto

When Marcello asks where Massimo knew Benedetto, Massimo answers simply, “A Jenne.” Asked what Benedetto was like, he says he loved him as he had loved no one else in the world except his mother. The brief exchange makes Jenne the setting of a relationship whose emotional importance is stated directly, even though the meeting itself is not described.

A Point in Benedetto’s Story

Later, at Marcello’s prompting, Massimo recounts his time in Rome, Subiaco, and Jenne, and explains how his connections with Don Aurelio, Don Clemente, and Benedetto began. His account follows Benedetto from his disappearance from his home in Oria, in Valsolda, to his religious self-dedication and eventual death in Rome, at the gardener’s house at Villa Mayda. Jenne thus belongs to a larger remembered history: the novel names it as the place of Massimo and Benedetto’s meeting, while the subsequent account places that meeting within a broader narrative of friendship, religious vocation, and loss.

Narrative Significance

Jenne is not developed as an independently described setting. Instead, it works as a precise point of reference in Massimo’s recollection. The contrast between the short answer identifying where the two men met and the long account of Benedetto’s later fate gives the place a quiet structural weight: it marks the beginning of a bond whose full significance emerges only as Massimo tells what followed.