Parco di Velo

Parco di Velo is a wooded park near the villa that becomes both a private refuge and the setting for one of Lelia’s gravest crises. Its darkness, water, and secluded paths shape her sense of being apart from ordinary life: first a place where she can disappear for hours, then a landscape in which the idea of leaving the world comes close to action.

Setting and Landscape

The park is reached through a wooden gate from the public road, below the small church of Santa Maria ad Montes. Within it, a faint track passes between a rise crowned with walnut and chestnut trees and a stream that emerges from dense beech and ash woods before running from ravine to ravine. The track ends in a flowered hollow with wooded sides. Elsewhere, a long, dark hornbeam walk, acacias, and smaller watercourses create a more enclosed terrain, with paths and sounds that can lead beyond sight.

The landscape is not presented as a single picturesque view. When Donna Fedele calls the park beautiful just after entering, Lelia considers that she has seen little more than the view from the road. She leads them farther along a barely marked track, toward the stream and the hollow where it ends. This contrast makes the park’s character something encountered by moving into it: its secluded spaces disclose themselves gradually, rather than at the entrance.

Secret Visits

After obtaining a key, Lelia goes into the park alone after nightfall on two successive evenings and remains there for hours. Teresina does not know what she does inside. She does know that she must conceal Lelia’s absence from Marcello, telling him that Lelia is in bed with a headache, and wait for her at the park gate at eleven. On the previous night, Lelia returned at midnight. Teresina’s fear and her appeal for guidance make clear that these visits have turned the park into a secret shared uneasily by the household, even though their purpose remains unknown to her.

A Refuge with a Mortal Edge

On a later night, Lelia leaves the villa and garden after waiting until she believes Marcello and Alberti have retired. She judges the wealthy marriage plan brought from Milan harshly and thinks that neither of her biological parents offers a refuge she can accept. The old thought of leaving the world, which had returned and receded through the years, comes back to her. The narrative distinguishes this thought from a settled decision: even the earlier incident in which she shut the windows of a room filled with lilies and tuberoses had not been intended, in her own understanding, as a way to die.

As she enters the park, her hand trembles at the gate, but the silence of the grounds soon alters her state. Moving over freshly cut grass and into the shadows, she feels that she has left the world behind. She lies on a warm, grassy slope beneath the dark sky; the night and the damp, fragrant earth ease the resistance of pride that has kept love at a distance. The park offers comfort, but that comfort is unstable: in the same landscape, withdrawal from other people can feel like a form of release from life itself.

She then enters the dark hornbeam walk and follows a path toward a stream near the acacias. Hearing water she cannot see, she begins to undress, stops when she recognizes what she is doing, and tests the current with her hand. The water is cold; she finds gravel and a depth of about two palms underfoot. The scene brings her dangerous thought into physical proximity with the stream, while preserving the distinction between contemplating escape and forming a definite resolve.

Return with Donna Fedele

The park also becomes a place Lelia enters in company. When she and Donna Fedele pass through the wooden gate, Lelia again guides the way, leaving the first view behind and following a faint trace through the trees to the water. At the track’s end, Donna Fedele sits beneath the walnut trees and looks pensively into the dark stream before asking Lelia about something her father has discussed with her. The setting thus frames a conversation between them, in marked contrast to Lelia’s solitary nocturnal visits: the same secluded ground that concealed her private distress now holds a moment of shared attention.