Momo visits her old friends

Momo visits her old friends after realizing that they have stopped coming to see her, and the visits reveal how the demand to work faster and get ahead has strained the relationships and everyday pleasures that once shaped their lives. Her attentive presence gives Salvatore room to voice his disgust with his work and helps Nino recognize the cost of his ambition. In bringing friends back into one another’s company, Momo unknowingly disrupts the Men in Gray’s plans.

Purpose and Circumstances

Momo cannot wait to ask her old friends what is wrong and why they have stopped visiting, so over the next few days she sets out to look them up. Her purpose is personal rather than strategic: she wants to understand the absence and renew the contact they once shared. Yet the visits take place in a city where work and time pressures are altering people’s routines. The friends’ distance is not presented as a simple rejection of Momo; their changed circumstances have made the old habit of visiting harder to sustain.

The first call is to Salvatore, the bricklayer, whose house Momo knows well. He lives in a small garret under the roof, but is away when she arrives. The other tenants tell her that he now works on a large housing development on the far side of town, earns a lot, seldom comes home, and usually returns in the small hours. They also say that he has taken to drinking and become difficult to get along with. Momo waits on the stairs outside his door anyway, making her willingness to see him concrete: she stays despite the late hour and despite what she has heard about his condition.

Salvatore’s Work and Disillusionment

When Salvatore finally encounters Momo in the middle of the night, he is hoarse and embarrassed to be seen as he is. Momo shyly explains that she has been waiting for him. Her visit prompts him to talk about the life he now leads: on the development site, the work is organized into rapid, relentless routines, with an entire floor assembled each day. As he describes the pace and the system, his initial account loses its note of enthusiasm. He falls silent and rubs his face with his roughened hands before admitting that he is drunk again.

Salvatore explains that drinking helps him endure the work, which violates his standards as an honest bricklayer. He says that the buildings are made with too little cement and too much sand, and predicts that they will last only four or five years before collapsing. Their defects are not merely technical in his account: he regards the new tenements as unsuitable places for people to live, likening them to hen coops. His distress comes from the contrast between the worthwhile building work that once gave him satisfaction and the shoddy construction he now performs for wages. He tells Momo that he intends to quit and do something different once he has made enough money, but the plan remains only an intention.

Momo listens without interrupting. Salvatore’s words move from a defense of the new pace of work to an admission of how little he can accept it; being heard allows that contradiction to emerge. He speaks more brightly again and suggests that he will visit Momo, though he cannot promise whether he can fit it in the next day or the day after. Momo leaves happy after they say good night, but Salvatore never appears—not the next day, the day after, or at all. The missed visit gives a concrete measure of the distance between his wish to reconnect and the life that keeps him away.

Nino, Liliana, and the Tavern

Momo next calls on Nino, the innkeeper, and his wife Liliana. Their little tavern stands on the outskirts of town; its damp-stained walls and the vine around the door mark a familiar place from the old days. Approaching by the kitchen, Momo hears the couple quarrelling. Liliana is clattering pots on the stove while Nino shouts and gestures, and their baby cries in a wicker crib. Rather than enter the quarrel, Momo sits beside the baby, takes it on her lap, and rocks it until it stops crying. The adults break off their argument and look toward her.

When Momo asks softly why they have not come to see her for so long, Nino responds irritably that he has enough worries and that they are pressed for time. Liliana’s anger identifies one source of those worries: Nino has driven out the old men who used to sit at the corner table, including Uncle Enrico. Nino insists that he merely asked them, quite politely, to take their custom elsewhere, and invokes his rights as the tavern’s landlord. Liliana objects that the men disturbed nobody and would not find another inn as easygoing. Their dispute turns on competing ideas of what success and responsibility require: Nino wants the business to advance, while Liliana sees his treatment of familiar customers as needless cruelty.

Nino says that Uncle Enrico could still come alone, but Liliana points out that he would not want to sit without his companions. Nino then declares that he will not spend his life as a small-time innkeeper for Uncle Enrico’s sake. He says that he wants to succeed for Liliana and their baby as well as for himself. Liliana rejects the idea that getting ahead justifies heartlessness and warns that she may leave him. She takes the baby, which has begun to cry again, and leaves the kitchen. Nino stays silent, lighting a cigarette and turning it between his fingers while Momo watches.

Reconciliation and the Wider Visits

Momo and Nino exchange almost imperceptible nods, then smile. Nino says he is glad she came and recalls their old invitation to one another: “Why not go and see Momo?” He promises to visit with Liliana on their day off two days later. Before Momo leaves, he gives her a large bag of apples and oranges. The promised visit happens: Nino and Liliana return with their baby and a basket of food. Liliana tells Momo that Nino has apologized to Uncle Enrico and the other old men, one by one, and asked them to come back. They have returned. Nino admits that this means giving up his plans for the inn, but says he likes the place again; Liliana assures him that they will get by. Their reconciliation does not restore his former ambition. Instead, it shows him accepting a different value in the tavern and its company.

Momo continues around to her old friends, including the carpenter who made her little table and chairs from packing cases and the women who brought her a bedstead. These are people she listened to in earlier days, and the story links that listening with their having grown wiser, happier, or more self-assured. Some do not keep their promises to visit, and some cannot come for lack of time. Nevertheless, enough familiar faces return that life around Momo becomes almost as it used to be. The change is partial: the old bonds are not restored uniformly, but they are no longer wholly absent.

Consequences and Significance

Momo does not know that these visits are upsetting the plans of the Men in Gray, who cannot tolerate the disruption. The contrast makes the action’s significance larger than Momo’s stated purpose. She is not organizing a campaign against them; she is returning to friends, asking why they have disappeared, and listening when they answer. Yet the renewed visits counter the isolation and preoccupation visible in Salvatore’s exhausting work life and Nino’s pursuit of success. The episode shows that personal attention can reopen relationships without argument or instruction: Salvatore is allowed to speak honestly, the baby is comforted, and Nino has room to recognize what he has sacrificed. The friends’ return is therefore both a modest recovery of ordinary fellowship and an unwitting challenge to the force that benefits when people have no time for one another.