Vicenza

Vicenza is one of the novel’s decisive waypoints: a place where journeys are redirected, religious obligations come under quiet strain, and Lelia’s attempt to escape her escort becomes an accomplished fact. It also lies on the route Don Aurelio expects to take after leaving his home and later on Donna Fedele’s difficult journey. The city is represented chiefly through its station and an unnamed sanctuary, not through a panoramic description; its importance comes from what its transit spaces make possible and what they demand of the travelers passing through them.

A waypoint in Don Aurelio’s departure

When Don Aurelio prepares to leave, Massimo Alberti realizes that his friend may not have enough money to support himself even for a short time away. Don Aurelio has only three lire. Massimo offers the fifty lire in his wallet, but Don Aurelio accepts just twelve, the amount he says he would have asked for himself: enough for the journey to Vicenza and, if necessary, onward to Milano. He refuses the remainder with a simplicity that makes the practical limits of his poverty visible. His departure is not merely a change of residence; it entails deciding what he can carry, what must be entrusted to others, and how little money he is willing to accept from a friend.

The preparations reduce his possessions to necessities. Don Aurelio shows Massimo a chest of drawers holding his small stock of linen, plans to write from Vicenza with instructions for sending it on, and considers how his books and furniture should be packed or entrusted to Donna Fedele. He remembers that Lúzia had hoped to receive his bed and decides it would be better to leave it to her than to sell the alarm clock. The projected stop in Vicenza therefore belongs to a larger passage from settled life into uncertainty: the city is the first named stage of a journey whose next destination may depend on whether he can find hospitality elsewhere.

Vicenza also figures in the ecclesiastical arrangements that follow. Don Aurelio tells Massimo that he has presented a letter of introduction from the Bishop of Vicenza to an archbishop, who has received him kindly and promised to accept him into his diocese. The arrangement is not immediate: time will be needed to place him, and meanwhile he may earn a living through tutoring as autumn and the October examinations approach. Don Aurelio advises Massimo to live independently and cautiously. In this account, Vicenza connects the personal hardship of departure with the institutional network through which a priest may seek a new position.

The sanctuary and the divided ritual

Lelia and Siora Bettina Fantuzzo reach Vicenza after beginning their journey from Arsiero before dawn. Siora Bettina has hurried to catch the train; on the way, she has worried over transfers, lost tickets, and a misplaced umbrella, while Lelia has watched the landscape pass, including the closed shutters of the Rose Villa and San Giorgio Cemetery. At Vicenza they leave their luggage in storage and travel by carriage to a sanctuary. Their plan is to continue toward Verona and Desenzano around eleven, so the visit is a pause within a tightly managed itinerary rather than their final destination.

At the sanctuary, Siora Bettina asks to confess to a priest she knows. Lelia does not answer. When Siora Bettina enters the confessional, Lelia approaches another, in a darker part of the church near the sacristy. It is occupied; after the woman inside leaves, the priest looks toward Lelia, who gives no sign that she wants to confess, and he returns to the sacristy. Lelia later tells her companion that she has already confessed, though the scene has shown no such confession. Siora Bettina receives Communion at the next Mass, while Lelia remains seated. Siora Bettina wonders whether Lelia has broken her fast or is waiting for another service, but Lelia does not join her at the communion rail. The sanctuary makes their outward companionship coexist with a concealed difference in conduct and intention.

That difference sharpens when they leave the sanctuary. Siora Bettina remains in prayer until Lelia’s rising makes clear that she is ready to go. On the bridge at Campomarzo, Siora Bettina finally proposes changing their plan: instead of proceeding to Castelletto, they should go only as far as Padua, where they can visit the shrine, and continue to Castelletto later if she feels better. Her professed indisposition gives Lelia a chance to reconsider the journey. At a station café, Lelia studies the timetable and finds that a departure from Padua at 14:52 could still bring them to Castelletto at 19:55. The train for Padua leaves at 11:08. She agrees to buy the tickets, asks Siora Bettina to settle the cost later, and says she will post a letter and buy postcards.

The station escape

The station becomes the setting for a deception whose success depends on ordinary travel procedures. Lelia leaves the café, posts a letter, retrieves her luggage from storage, and obtains a ticket. Although she holds a first-class ticket, she has her baggage taken to a third-class carriage. When the direct train from Padua arrives, she springs aboard without her companion. She has told Siora Bettina that she is going to Padua; the porter later confirms instead that she left on the train for Milano.

The porter identifies her by the details of her clothing: an ash-colored coat with large blue buttons, a blue hat with an ash-colored veil, ash-colored gloves, and a blue umbrella with a gold handle. His account reconstructs the escape step by step and overturns Siora Bettina’s expectation that the two are still traveling together. The woman who had struggled through each transfer and feared losing her belongings is left behind at the station, while Lelia has converted the timetable, luggage arrangements, and a plausible errand into means of departure.

Siora Bettina’s immediate collapse is both physical and comic in detail. She loses strength in her legs and sight; bystanders support her and offer Marsala, which she refuses. When someone splashes water toward her face, she protests because she fears her hat will be ruined. Once she recovers somewhat, she says that Lelia has gone into a convent and laments being alone. A station newswoman understands that the shock of being abandoned may weigh more heavily than the flight itself. Asked whether Lelia is her daughter, Siora Bettina denies it. She wants to return to Arsiero, but that train has left five minutes earlier. A police official questions her about the escape; she supposes Lelia has gone toward Desenzano, but the official reports that no ticket was bought for that destination. The city’s station turns a private evasion into a public incident, witnessed by porters, railway workers, bystanders, and the police.

Donna Fedele’s difficult passage

Vicenza recurs later as a stage in Donna Fedele’s journey. At its station, she and her fellow travelers must wait two long hours. The steam tram’s uncomfortable carriage and the transfers have already tired her. During the wait, a cold tingling runs across her shoulders and chest and her sight darkens. She takes a small glass of cognac and recovers, but the episode makes her fear that she may not survive the journey. The danger had not seemed real before she set out; afterward, the possibility repeatedly returns to her thoughts as the train carries her toward Milano.

The stop also forces a practical decision about the next day’s travel. Donna Fedele weighs whether to leave Milano quickly to reach her destination sooner or to rest and travel in better condition. The prospect of seeing Don Aurelio again comforts her: she imagines his spiritual assistance as a source of strength on the remainder of the journey. Yet she also reasons that, if she is to bring Lelia and Massimo Alberti together, they must see her arrive alone and nearly at the end of her strength. Vicenza thus marks more than physical difficulty. It is where exhaustion, fear, and the purpose she has chosen for her journey press against one another.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, Vicenza is defined by passage rather than residence. For Don Aurelio, it is an early stage in a departure made precarious by poverty and uncertain employment; in his later account, it is also associated with the letter of introduction that may secure him a place in another diocese. For Lelia, the station’s clocks, tickets, baggage, and multiple trains provide the practical conditions for separation. For Donna Fedele, the transfer and long wait expose how vulnerable her body has become even as she persists toward her destination.

The city’s religious setting and railway setting produce contrasting kinds of movement. At the sanctuary, Lelia’s stillness conceals a choice not to participate alongside Siora Bettina; at the station, her decisive movement makes that concealed separation physical. Donna Fedele’s passage brings the same travel infrastructure into a different register: not escape, but endurance. Vicenza gathers these distinct uses without resolving them into a single meaning. It is at once a place of religious observance, institutional connection, concealment, departure, and bodily risk—a junction where intention becomes visible through what each traveler does next.