Montanina is the estate left to Lelia by Marcello Trento, and one of the novel’s most charged domestic settings. It begins as a home she experiences as alive and maternal; after she returns to live there with her biological father, Girolamo da Camin, the same house feels dead and estranged. Its paths, windows, and mountain view hold together inheritance, family conflict, painful memory, and the possibility of a shared future with Massimo Alberti.

Identity and setting

Montanina is a villa set within a landscape of wooded slopes and mountain ridges. Its grounds include a large gate, a lime-tree avenue, and a boundary running beside the Riderella Creek. From his position by a window, Massimo Alberti watches figures approach along the road and cross the bridge before coming toward the villa. The scene makes the house a visible but enclosed presence in the landscape: its gate and boundary mark a threshold between the surrounding road and the household within.

The villa is also defined by what can be seen from inside it. Lelia remembers the small, inclined tooth of a dolomite ridge framed in a narrow field from the saloon. When she later meets Massimo Alberti, she asks him to show her that same point on the mountain. The view is not merely a feature of the scenery: it connects her present journey to her remembered life in the house. Her recollection of the ridge makes the interior of Montanina present even when she is far away from it.

Inheritance and family conflict

The villa’s place in the story is shaped by Marcello Trento’s will. After his death, the will names Lelia the universal heir; the household’s former servant, Teresina, receives a daily legacy of five lire. A notice also reports that Girolamo da Camin has declared himself Lelia’s father and announced his arrival. The same notice records that Lelia says she is twenty years and a few months old, while Marcello had believed her older. The inheritance thus brings together the villa, Lelia’s age and family identity, and the arrival of a father whose claim will alter her domestic life.

Girolamo Camin arrives at Arsiero with Francesco Molesin and Carolina Gorlago, his housekeeper, and the group takes a carriage toward Montanina. His approach to the inheritance is strategic. He expects to have only a few months of control before Lelia comes of age, and plans to appropriate as much of the movable property as possible in that time. He hopes that an appearance of humility will lead her to grant him a generous allowance later. He also understands that Molesin wants Lelia brought into her father’s household so that, by controlling her and preventing a marriage, he can gain effective control of the Trento estate. Girolamo’s own aims are narrower, but he cannot reconcile keeping Lelia at home with retaining Carolina, to whom he is attached despite their quarrels and mutual infidelity.

The property is therefore more than a bequest or a place to live: it is the focus of competing attempts at control. When Girolamo later visits Lelia at the Rose Villa, he behaves deferentially rather than asserting his paternal rights. He gives her a packet of ten-lire notes, calls them her own money, and says he will account for his management. His conciliatory manner does not erase the material calculations behind his approach to her inheritance.

A home made strange

Lelia’s experience of Montanina changes after she returns to live with her father. When she later falls at Donna Fedele’s knees and says she can no longer endure the villa, she does not describe a single new incident as the cause. Instead, she has encountered at close quarters a reality she already knew and hated from a distance. She says she would almost have preferred her father to treat her badly: his manner is humble, ceremonious, and nauseatingly ingratiating. He asks permission even to have hay gathered, and she sees the same obsequiousness in his dealings with Teresina.

The house itself has altered in Lelia’s perception. Where its walls once seemed alive and maternal, they now feel dead, indifferent to her, and marked by her father’s spiritual presence. Her sense of estrangement reaches beyond dislike of its occupants: she privately wonders whether she can truly be Girolamo’s daughter. Montanina has not physically changed in the account, but it no longer shelters the person she had been there. Her return converts the familiar villa into a setting she cannot bear, and she asks Donna Fedele for an answer about what is to become of her.

The distance from the villa does not immediately settle her future. Lelia hopes that her father will answer a letter and permit her to remain away; Donna Fedele considers finding her a safe place with a cousin at Santhià, rather than sending her back to Velo. In the meantime, the mountain view from Montanina stays with Lelia. At her reunion with Massimo Alberti, she distinguishes the real ridge from its remembered appearance, as if the landscape can carry both the consolation of home and the pain of having lost it.

The villa’s future

Montanina remains connected to Lelia and Massimo Alberti even after they have left it behind. Donna Fedele tells the two young people that, if Lelia has given up enjoying her estate, there is little point in discussing it then; she is young, and one day Montanina will be at their disposal. She asks them not to abandon it and hopes that, when they can be there, they will arrange a Mass for her at Santa Maria ad Montes and let her attend. Her words cast the house as a possible future home for the pair, though they do not describe an immediate transfer of ownership.

Near the end of Donna Fedele’s life, the father’s consent resolves one part of the villa’s unsettled status. Massimo Alberti shows her a letter in which Girolamo agrees to act only as an agent and to leave Montanina free to Lelia, adding that the air there does not suit him. Donna Fedele, who appears briefly to regain strength, asks Massimo to show Lelia the letter. The permission does not undo Lelia’s painful experience of living at the villa with her father, but it restores her practical freedom in relation to the estate.

Across these changes, Montanina functions both as a material inheritance and as an unstable idea of home. The house can be maternal in memory, alienating in daily life, and still imaginable as a place Lelia and Massimo Alberti might share. Its framed mountain view carries that contradiction most clearly: what Lelia remembers from the saloon remains hers even while the villa itself has become a place she must leave.