Momo helps Nino and Salvatore make peace

Momo helps Nino and Salvatore make peace by giving two angry neighbors time and space to uncover what their feud is really about. The reconciliation turns a tangle of retaliatory insults and competing claims into a shared understanding, and its effects later reach beyond the two men: Nino apologizes to the old customers who had stopped coming to his inn and asks them to return.

Setting and Background

Momo’s connection to both men began in the neighborhood around the Amphitheater. When she was offered a place in one of the neighbors’ homes, she asked instead to remain in her room beneath the stage. The residents agreed to look after her together. They repaired and furnished the stone cell as best they could: Salvatore, a bricklayer, made her a miniature stove and painted a flower on the wall, while other neighbors supplied furniture and bedding. Their children brought food, and the work became a housewarming celebration. This shared care made Momo a familiar friend to the people around her, not an outside judge summoned to settle their affairs.

Nino and Salvatore were both close neighbors and friends of Momo. Nino ran a small inn, where a handful of elderly customers passed their evenings over a glass of wine; his wife, Liliana, also knew Momo and had brought her food. The men arrived at Momo’s after quarreling so violently that they had stopped speaking to one another. Friends had urged them to visit her, though both came reluctantly. Momo’s gift was listening: people could find their own thoughts and feelings more clearly in her company. Here, however, that gift did not produce an instant answer. It first gave the dispute room to emerge.

The Feud Unfolds

Nino and Salvatore sat at opposite sides of the stone arena, scowling in silence. Momo sat midway between them, looking from one to the other rather than choosing whom to approach. She waited. When Salvatore finally rose to leave, he complained that Nino was too stubborn to talk. Nino answered with an accusation of his own, claiming that Salvatore had tried to murder him. Salvatore retorted that he had only seized Nino by the scruff of the neck and dunked him in the pool of slops behind the inn. The exchange made plain how far their argument had escalated, but not yet why.

As the insults continued, their accounts exposed a chain of grievances. Salvatore said Nino had slapped him in front of customers; Nino countered that Salvatore had tried to smash his crockery. Salvatore maintained that he had thrown only one jug, and that it had already been cracked. He also admitted painting words on Nino’s door, while explaining that he had done so after Nino refused to serve him even one glass of wine. Nino invoked a separate dispute over a picture of St Anthony. Each man treated his own retaliation as an answer to an earlier wrong, so that every accusation appeared to confirm the other’s case.

The quarrel’s original cause lay in a bargain. Nino had cut a picture of St Anthony from an illustrated magazine, framed it, and hung it in his bar. Salvatore offered to buy it, and Nino, pleased with his skill at haggling, traded the picture for Salvatore’s radio. Only afterward did they discover a banknote tucked between the picture and its cardboard backing. Nino had not known it was there and demanded the money back, arguing it had not been part of the deal. Salvatore refused; Nino then stopped serving him. The dispute had grown from that refusal into a succession of insults and physical confrontations.

Momo’s Role and the Reconciliation

Once Nino and Salvatore had traced the feud back to the exchange, they fell quiet. Nino asked Salvatore directly whether he had known about the banknote before making the bargain. Salvatore admitted that he had. The admission clarified the central grievance: Nino had unknowingly made a worse bargain than he believed, while Salvatore had knowingly kept the advantage. Yet the discovery did not lead to another round of retaliation. Salvatore scratched his head and offered to give the picture back. Nino refused, insisting that a deal was a deal because they had shaken hands on it.

The men suddenly burst out laughing. They climbed down the stone steps, met in the middle of the grassy arena, embraced, and slapped each other on the back. Then they hugged Momo and thanked her. She waved as they left, glad that the two friends had made up. The scene resolves the feud not through an imposed verdict or a repayment, but through the men’s recognition of how a comparatively small transaction had accumulated into a much larger rupture—and their choice to stop treating it as a reason for continued hostility.

Later Effects and Significance

The renewed connection with Momo continued after this encounter. On a later visit, Nino said he had forgotten that he and his friends used to urge one another to go and see her; he promised to return with Liliana. Two days later they arrived with their baby and a basket of food. Liliana told Momo that Nino had apologized one by one to Uncle Enrico and the other old men who had stopped coming to the inn, and had asked them to come back. They did. Nino acknowledged that this meant abandoning his plans for the inn, but said that he liked the place again. The episode links making peace with Salvatore to a broader repair in Nino’s neighborhood life: the inn regains its former customers, and Nino can once more take pleasure in it.

Momo’s intervention is characteristic precisely because she does not command the men to reconcile or settle which of them is wholly right. Her patience lets their accusations disclose the history beneath them, including the fact that each had contributed to the conflict in a different way. The arena that neighbors had helped turn into Momo’s home becomes a meeting place where silence gives way first to explanation, then laughter and embraces. In the later return of Nino’s customers, the reconciliation’s significance extends from a quarrel between friends to the social ties that make a neighborhood and its shared places livable.