Massimo leaves Milan for Dasio

Massimo Alberti’s departure from Milano for Dasio begins as both a practical escape and a search for spiritual quiet. A newspaper notice for a doctor’s post in Valsolda gives him a reason to travel to a place connected with a private act of devotion; his later account makes clear that he also intends to leave his former life behind. Dasio offers the remoteness he seeks, but its silence sharpens rather than stills his inner conflict.

The decision and its concealed purpose

After returning to Milano, Massimo sees urgent reasons not to remain dependent on his uncle. He has been uncomfortable in his uncle’s household for some time: their intellectual dispositions differ sharply, and his uncle disapproves of his failure to secure regular, stable, profitable work. Massimo acknowledges his uncle’s religious integrity and charity, but also feels misjudged on matters of faith. The wish to leave therefore grows out of both practical dependence and a deeper sense of estrangement.

Massimo tells his uncle that he plans to enter the competition for a medical position in Valsolda and visit a place he does not know. He does not disclose the larger intention: to abandon Milano permanently if he can find a solitary refuge there or elsewhere, whether or not he obtains a post. The application is a real possibility, not merely a pretext, but the disparity between what he announces and what he privately hopes makes the journey a quiet break with his previous circumstances.

From newspaper notice to departure

An earlier station episode gives the journey its first concrete turn. At Vicenza, Massimo waits for two hours, walks beneath the plane trees, and briefly imagines living in the small, peaceful city, only to reject the thought because Velo d’Astico is too near. He returns to the station as a train for Thiene and Schio is being called. Taking it would bring him to the Rose Villa before nightfall, and he momentarily faces the prospect of returning there and leaving the green valleys and mountain roses behind.

Instead, in the station café, he reads the Corriere della Sera through its advertisements. One notice announces an August competition for the medical-surgical practice serving the municipalities of Valsolda, with a salary of 3,500 lire, and directs applications to the mayor of Drano. When a train for Verona, Brescia, and Milano is called half an hour later, Massimo rises in a daze, still holding the newspaper. The episode catches the decision at its threshold: the advertisement has given a destination and a possible occupation to a desire that is not simply professional. His later letter explains that, after returning to Milano and visiting the cemetery at Velo with Donna Fedele, he read the notice and set off for Valsolda.

The route to Dasio

Massimo’s choice of Valsolda is tied to a duty toward the person and memory of the man he says he loved more than anyone in the world. He expects to travel there in any case for that pious purpose. The intended medical appointment thus overlaps with an act of remembrance, while his concealed wish for a permanent retreat gives the journey a further, more personal direction.

A boat on Lago di Lugano carries him to the village described to him as the center of Valsolda. On arriving, he decides that it is not suited to the solitude he wants. He learns of decent lodgings in a higher, more remote village and continues to Dasio. His hotel, the Pension Restaurant du Jardin, has no other guests at that time. Massimo writes from a clean, square room, but takes his paper and ink to the windowsill, which looks over a broad descent of greenery toward the deep surface of the lake. The route is not an abstract withdrawal: it moves him from a connected village to a sparsely occupied inn among mountains and old churches.

Solitude without peace

Dasio initially seems to offer the distance Massimo has sought. He describes himself as apparently only four or five hours from Milano, yet in reality infinitely far away. From the inn he can see the village church, whose facade bears the words Divo Bernardino, and, farther below, a bell tower cutting across the lake’s reflection. The mountains, valley churches, and stones seem to hold an older Catholic spirit, a landscape in which he hopes to hear a call drawing human souls toward God.

But the hoped-for concord between scenery and belief fails. Massimo admits to Donna Fedele that his soul cannot enter into conversation with the mountains, valleys, or churches because it contains no quiet. His inner life moves repeatedly from deadening torpor to irritated bitterness and from bitterness to terror; resisting these states does not bring calm. The silence of Dasio makes the voices of the world he has fled more painfully audible. The departure therefore changes his surroundings without resolving the crisis that drove him away: geographical distance supplies a refuge, but not the inward peace that would make it a home.