Milan

Milan is both a place in the history of Septimus Warren Smith and Lucrezia Warren Smith’s marriage and a point of contrast in Lucrezia’s London life. Recalled through separate perspectives, it holds the memory of her family and a more sociable Italian world, while also marking Septimus’s postwar engagement and the refuge he sought among Lucrezia’s sisters.

Setting and Family Life

After the Armistice, Septimus was billeted in Milan at an innkeeper’s house with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, and small tables outdoors. The setting belongs to the first period of peace after the war, but peace does not bring him an uncomplicated return to feeling: he experiences sudden fear, and ordinary surroundings become a refuge he cannot remain in indefinitely.

The house also contained the room where Lucrezia and her sisters made hats. Septimus could see and hear them working with coloured beads, buckram shapes, feathers, spangles, silk, and ribbons. Their activity offered him temporary protection; the scissors’ tapping and the girls’ laughter accompanied work that continued around him even when he felt emotionally cut off.

Septimus and Lucrezia

One evening, during a period of panic at his inability to feel, Septimus became engaged to Lucrezia, the younger daughter. He was not yet thirty and had survived the war, but the apparent security of survival was undercut by his fear that he could not feel. The engagement thus begins amid vulnerability rather than a simple restoration of ordinary life.

Lucrezia’s sisters and their millinery work gave Septimus a place to turn to, but not a lasting escape: he could not sit in the room all night, and his fear returned, including in moments of waking. Milan is therefore connected both to the beginning of his marriage and to the limits of the shelter he found there.

Lucrezia’s Memories of Milan

In London, Lucrezia remembers Milan through the white houses and the room where her sisters sat making hats. She contrasts its streets, crowded in the evenings with people walking and laughing, with the subdued life she sees around her in London. Speaking aloud about the Milan gardens, she finds no one to answer; the memory makes her distance from home and her isolation in the present more apparent.

Her recollection is not merely scenic. The sisters’ shared work and the lively streets stand against the loneliness of caring for Septimus while being unable to tell others what is happening. Milan becomes an absent social world, remembered vividly but unavailable as a remedy for the separation she feels in London.

Narrative Significance

Milan gathers two related but unequal memories: for Septimus, the courtyard and hat-making room offer a temporary refuge after war; for Lucrezia, the city recalls family, companionship, and public life. Neither memory cancels the continuing consequences of the war or their later isolation. The city matters through this contrast between communal activity and private distress, and through its place at the start of a marriage that cannot by itself restore Septimus’s sense of connection.