Letizia Delvecchio

Letizia Delvecchio, an architect from Salento, is Marco Carrera’s mother and one half of a marriage whose quiet unhappiness shapes the Carrera household. She first interprets Marco’s short stature as part of his distinctive beauty and natural harmony, resisting medical intervention; later, she re-examines the proposed treatment and accompanies Probo to assess it. Her movement from protective conviction to qualified cooperation makes the dispute over Marco’s growth a revealing test of both parental care and the couple’s capacity to act together.

Identity and Family Background

Letizia is an architect, retired by the time of a later account that identifies her as living in Florence with her husband, Probo Carrera. She is the mother of Marco, Irene and Giacomo. Her origins and outlook differ sharply from Probo’s: she is from Salento in Apulia, while he comes from the province of Sondrio. The narrative describes her as absorbed in thought and revolution, in contrast to Probo, an engineer associated with calculation and practical skill. Their professional and temperamental differences are not incidental contrasts; they help explain why their shared life is so often represented as a contest between incompatible ways of understanding the world.

During Marco’s childhood, Letizia’s activities also include design, photography, yoga and psychoanalysis. The account presents them as attempts to find balance amid a household marked by resentment and concealed conflict. She has lovers among Florence’s intellectual circles and betrays Probo, though the narrative says she does so clumsily. The children do not initially understand the strain between their parents. Their disagreements are usually conducted in whispers, out of the children’s hearing, and Irene is the one who listens and remembers them closely. Letizia’s outwardly active life thus coexists with a marriage in which affection is profoundly unequal: Probo continues to love her, but she cannot accept or return that love in the same way.

The Hummingbird and Marco’s Growth

Marco’s physical development remains low on the growth charts from his first year, and by age three he has fallen outside them. Yet he is described as beautiful and proportionate. Letizia reads that combination not as evidence of illness but as a sign that nature has marked him out. His smallness, grace and beauty become the basis of her protective interpretation of him: she calls him a hummingbird, emphasizing his quickness as well as his delicate appearance. She insists repeatedly that there is no reason to worry.

That assurance is not merely a response to a diagnosis. Letizia has built an idea of Marco around the hummingbird image, imagining his smallness and beauty as exceptional gifts and his development as governed by a different natural rhythm. Her analyst calls this attachment the myth of the hummingbird. It embodies a mother’s care, but it also makes it difficult for her to accept a medical account of her son’s body. The possibility that his growth might need to be changed threatens a cherished interpretation of who he is.

Probo’s concern intensifies as Marco approaches adolescence without growing at a typical rate. When Marco is fourteen, his father can no longer accept reassurance and arranges consultations and tests. They establish that Marco has moderate, not severe, statural hypoevolutism caused by insufficient production of growth hormone. At the time, treatment is experimental and generally restricted to more severe cases. A pediatric endocrinologist in Milan, Dr. Vavassori, nevertheless tells Probo that a program he has been carrying out has produced encouraging results and may help.

The Argument over Treatment

Probo tells Letizia that he wants Marco included in Dr. Vavassori’s program. Letizia calls the proposal madness; Probo counters that it was madness to have let the problem run its course for so long. She returns to Marco’s harmony and the hummingbird, while Probo insists that a diagnosable condition should not be left untreated simply because its effects can be described in aesthetic terms. Their clash brings into the open a question that had been confined to whispered disputes: whether respecting Marco’s body means accepting its existing development or pursuing the scientific means then available to alter it.

Letizia supports her position with On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s study of the relationship between form and development. She invokes its argument that natural form and growth follow an intrinsic harmonic law. The book becomes both intellectual evidence and a weapon in the argument, as each parent accuses the other of misunderstanding or misusing it. Probo’s anger breaks the family’s usual pattern of whispered quarrels: he shouts that Thompson should be put up her ass, and the brothers, who have not understood that the dispute concerns Marco, hear the argument from elsewhere in the house. Irene, who has followed it from the beginning, understands what is at stake.

The quarrel might have led the couple to separate, but Irene intervenes. Her intervention brings her parents back together, and the immediate result is a decision to remain together for the children rather than to break up the marriage. The account does not present this reconciliation as a restoration of happiness. Letizia and Probo recognize that they have long been unhappy, and their renewed restraint becomes another way of living with that unhappiness rather than resolving it. The children’s welfare is the stated reason for their choice, but the narrative emphasizes its cost: a troubled marriage can pass its unhappiness on even when the parents intend their sacrifice as protection.

Cooperation and Significance

The treatment dispute produces a rare practical compromise. Letizia makes an effort to relinquish the hummingbird myth and to accept Probo’s view that everything scientifically possible should be done to help Marco grow. Probo, in turn, tries not to treat her agreement as a victory over her. He understands that claiming it as a personal triumph would leave him more isolated, and instead hopes the decision can become a way to share something important again with the woman he still loves.

He takes Letizia to Milan to meet Dr. Vavassori, asking her to assess the specialist and independently check the solidity of the proposed treatment. He also promises to take her judgment into account before making a final decision. Letizia repeats the research Probo had undertaken alone over the preceding months and concludes that the Milan specialist’s protocol is the only serious option then available from the scientific community. They have not overcome their marital estrangement, but they find themselves, for once, on the same path.

Letizia’s role in the episode remains deliberately ambivalent. Her resistance arises from close attention to Marco’s beauty and distinctive body, yet her protective interpretation risks making his continued smallness serve an ideal she has formed around him. The change in her position is therefore not a simple rejection of maternal feeling: it is an effort to distinguish care for Marco from attachment to the image of the hummingbird. At the same time, the narrative does not reduce the decision to a conflict between a mistaken mother and correct medical authority. The treatment is experimental, and Letizia investigates it rather than submitting automatically to Probo’s judgment. Her eventual agreement emerges from scrutiny and a negotiated parental decision, while the argument that precedes it reveals how an attempt to care for a child can become entangled with the history and unmet needs of a marriage.