Villino delle Rose, Donna Fedele’s villa near Velo, serves as both a refuge and a place of reckoning. Its rooms shelter conversations about Lelia’s future, a concealed suicide crisis, and an uneasy meeting with her father; its roses, piano, and upper-floor window give those conflicts a material setting. As Donna Fedele’s health worsens, the villa becomes the home she must leave behind in order to reach Lelia and Massimo Alberti in Valsolda.

Setting and Spaces

The villa’s rooms shape the movement of the story. Its salon is a place for private and guarded conversation: Donna Fedele has the doors closed before speaking with Massimo, distrustful of the spying and gossip surrounding him and Lelia. The villa also has a veranda at the front, where a meal gives Donna Fedele and Lelia a moment of apparent calm, and a piano that Lelia plays alone after others have withdrawn.

A bedroom on the top floor occupies a corner of the house. From its south-facing window, Lelia can see the plain of Arsiero, Priaforà, and Montanina. The Posina runs out of sight between the plain and the mountain. On a stormy night, Lelia remembers the river crossing and the deep, noisy water beneath it, as well as the quieter millrace running alongside. She has fixed on a time to leave the villa and jump from the bridge into the millrace. The window and its view therefore hold an acute contrast: the landscape is familiar enough for her to picture a route to death, while the room remains the enclosed place where she hesitates, listens, and writes a farewell note.

A House of Care and Mediation

The villa is a base for Donna Fedele’s attention to others, not simply her private residence. Teresina carries a secret message to her from Don Aurelio: Lelia is getting worse. Donna Fedele has been unwell herself, and after the assault on Don Aurelio’s rectory she has not been seen for two days, although she had previously visited him almost daily. The message shows how the household keeps watch and communicates even when Donna Fedele is confined by illness.

Massimo comes to the villa after leaving Don Aurelio. Donna Fedele hears his account of the priest’s departure, then carefully asks whether his feelings for Lelia are serious. She believes Lelia may return his love but struggle against it, perhaps out of loyalty to the memory of the dead or reluctance to hurt Marcello Trento. In offering help, Donna Fedele makes the villa a setting for deliberate mediation between the two. She has arranged a carriage for nine and invites Massimo to return later, either to learn what has happened or to share a meal. Her confidence in him is affectionate but purposeful: she wants to give the young couple a chance without treating Lelia’s future as a decision others may impose upon her.

The villa’s care extends beyond its immediate household. Before returning there, Donna Fedele visits a consumptive young man in Seghe, a former painter’s assistant whom she has helped reconcile with God and the Church. When a chaplain has discouraged him from reading the Gospels she gave him, she promises to read and explain them herself. At the villa she speaks openly of missing Don Aurelio’s wise, gentle counsel and of needing to become more charitable toward priests unlike him. These episodes place her domestic life alongside her visiting, religious, and charitable work.

Lelia’s Crisis and Her Father’s Visit

The villa’s gentler spaces cannot resolve Lelia’s isolation. After playing at the piano, she asks that the veranda doors be left open, then goes upstairs to the bedroom overlooking the dark landscape. At half past ten she checks the time: midnight is when she has decided to leave for the bridge. She writes that she is going to die without knowing why, and still less why she should live. The note gives the crisis a physical and domestic setting, but the intended act reaches beyond the house into the landscape she sees from its window.

After Lelia is brought back unconscious, Donna Fedele has her placed in a bedroom with two beds. When Lelia wakes, Donna Fedele tells her that she has had an attack of sleepwalking and urges her to lie still. She has recognized the attempt, but worries that Lelia will feel humiliated if she knows it was suspected. The room thus becomes a place of protection sustained by a compassionate deception: Donna Fedele stays close, even as she tries to spare Lelia the shame of being watched and rescued.

The next morning, Lelia’s father, Momi Camin, arrives at the villa. Donna Fedele receives him and, despite Lelia’s condition, insists that she meet him. Momi brings banknotes and speaks haltingly of the money as Lelia’s, promising to account for it when she comes of age. The narrative also makes clear that his humility is strategic: he hopes to gain access to the family’s movable assets and later secure generous support from his daughter, while balancing his attachment to Carolina Gorlago against the prospect of bringing Lelia into his home. In the villa’s formal rooms, Lelia receives him standing, rigid and unsmiling, and endures his kisses without welcoming them. The meeting makes the house a temporary boundary between her and the father whose home she fears returning to.

Roses, Departure, and Significance

The villa’s roses gather meaning as Donna Fedele’s own departure approaches. At a meal on the veranda, Lelia suggests visiting the small cemetery with her friend and bringing roses. She wishes they had white ones, but the villa has only a few red blooms. Donna Fedele jokes that the house deserves to be called a villa of thorns and says it ought to be surrounded and dressed in roses. The exchange is tender, but the flowers also connect the house to bereavement and to the choices its occupants cannot avoid.

When Donna Fedele decides to abandon her planned journey to Turin for surgery and go instead to Valsolda, she offers her life to God for the sake of two souls who have turned away from Him and for Lelia’s safe passage through danger. Before leaving, she asks the gardener to cut the remaining roses. Each one placed in the small basket deepens her sense of an approaching farewell—to the plants, the villa, and the landscape. The villa is left not as an uncomplicated sanctuary but as the home from which her acts of care must travel outward.

That change gives the setting its narrative force. The villa shelters watchfulness, conversation, religious care, and Lelia’s recovery, yet it cannot keep her from confronting her father or choosing where to live. Its enclosed rooms hold what cannot yet be spoken; the upper window opens onto the terrain of Lelia’s threatened death; and its roses accompany Donna Fedele as she leaves to intervene once more. The house’s warmth is real, but it is not a substitute for the difficult journeys its inhabitants must make.