Piero Maironi leaves home for religious life and becomes Benedetto in a break with both his former household and ordinary worldly existence. The novel presents the departure through Massimo Alberti’s later account: Piero vanishes from Oria in Valsolda in order to give himself to God. His change of life becomes the central fact by which others remember him, even as his later reputation as a holy man remains distinct from the Church’s more cautious language about the dead.

Departure from Oria

Massimo tells the story of Piero’s departure while describing his own connection to Don Aurelio and to the people who shaped his religious experience. He traces Piero’s course from the night he disappeared from his home in Oria, in Valsolda, and from the world, choosing to dedicate himself to God. The account makes the departure a deliberate renunciation: Piero leaves not simply a place but the ordinary life represented by home and worldly society.

The narrative supplies no practical itinerary for the departure and does not describe the immediate circumstances of Piero’s decision in detail. Instead, Massimo compresses the break into its defining movement away from Oria and toward a life given to God. That reticence leaves the act’s consequence in the foreground: Piero becomes known as Benedetto, a religious figure whose identity is bound to the renunciation that began with his disappearance.

Benedetto’s life as Massimo recounts it

Massimo presents Piero’s transformation as part of a wider history of religious lives and relationships, not as an isolated change of name. He connects Benedetto’s story to Don Aurelio, whom he describes as a shared friend and a priest devoted to his ministry, and recounts the events of Benedetto’s life through its final hours. The departure from Oria therefore functions as the threshold of a history that Massimo can narrate only in retrospect, after Benedetto’s death.

That retrospective account also includes Jeanne’s part in Benedetto’s last hours. Massimo explains that he encountered her briefly at Villa Mayda, where Benedetto died in Rome, and tells Lelia that he knows nothing of what became of her afterward. The account gives the departure a stark temporal arc: Piero disappears from his former home to give himself to God; the man remembered as Benedetto eventually dies far from Oria, in the gardener’s cottage at Villa Mayda.

Death, burial, and competing memories

Benedetto’s death does not end the story of his departure. At his funeral, the body is brought back to Oria, and the burial takes place beside Elisa Maironi. The return to the village contrasts with the earlier disappearance: the man who had left home and the world is carried back among a community gathered to mourn him. Massimo, Don Aurelio, and Benedetto’s disciples participate in the funeral, while a veiled woman attends without being publicly identified.

The funeral also distinguishes popular devotion from ecclesiastical judgment. Don Aurelio’s sermon acknowledges that local people had called Benedetto a saint, but stresses that the Church, when praying for the dead, does not pronounce on their sanctity or virtue. It recognizes human frailty and entrusts the dead to divine mercy. The distinction does not erase Benedetto’s impact; it frames his memory as an object of love, grief, prayer, and unresolved judgment rather than a settled public verdict.

Significance of the transformation

Piero’s disappearance and life as Benedetto are presented through Massimo’s telling, so the reader receives the transformation as remembered testimony rather than a directly staged conversion. That narrative distance makes the departure both concrete and partly hidden: its location and purpose are named, but the inner process and precise circumstances are not supplied. The event’s importance lies in the decisive change it establishes and in the long afterlife of that choice in other people’s accounts of Benedetto.

The funeral completes the pattern without reducing it to a simple triumph. Benedetto’s life is remembered as a dedication to God, and Don Aurelio says he died trusting in a future unity of Christians around the Roman See. Yet the sermon refuses to turn admiration into a declaration of sainthood. The departure thus remains the beginning of a religious vocation whose meaning is sustained by acts of remembrance and prayer, while its final judgment is left to God.