Florence

Florence is the city Leda leaves her family and hometown to reach as a young woman, and it remains a recurring point of return as her intellectual ambitions take shape and her family life fractures. The narrative gives little physical description of the city; instead, Florence acquires meaning through what Leda does there and what she carries away from it: study, professional recognition, books and notes, and the possibility of living apart from her husband and daughters.

Leaving for Florence

Leda recalls that she did not begin to like herself until she was eighteen, when she left her family and city to study in Florence. The move marks a decisive beginning in her adult self-understanding. Florence is not presented as a detailed landscape or as a city whose institutions are described; its significance lies in the distance it opens between Leda and the family life she has left. In her account, leaving for study coincides with the emergence of a stronger sense of herself.

That remembered departure also gives Florence a complicated emotional weight. It stands for education and the possibility of becoming someone beyond the roles assigned within a family, but it does not resolve the later conflict between personal ambition and care for children. Leda’s subsequent choices repeat the movement away from home, while the consequences of those choices become increasingly difficult to contain.

Academic life and recognition

After an academic conference and her encounter with Professor Hardy, Leda returns to Florence. Her professor there, previously less supportive, becomes suddenly available and works energetically to help her finish and publish a new essay. He also collaborates with Hardy to make it possible for Leda to spend time at Hardy’s university. Florence is thus the base from which an expanded academic career becomes imaginable: the city connects her local professor’s assistance with the opportunity to work elsewhere.

The professional change arrives amid a private crisis rather than replacing it. Leda describes entering a period of painful, frenzied work, studying intensely while feeling unable to live without Hardy. She writes long letters and calls him; when Gianni is home, she hurries to a pay phone and takes Bianca and Marta with her so he will not become suspicious. The calls make her daughters witnesses to a life she is trying to keep separate from domestic responsibilities. Florence, as the place to which she returns and from which her academic possibilities develop, is associated with both intellectual momentum and the strain of dividing her attention and loyalties.

Leda also describes leaving for England and returning, then leaving again. The repeated departures give Florence the role of a home base within a wider circuit of academic travel, though the evidence does not specify the city’s university or the practical arrangements of her stays. What is clear is that the work and opportunities linked to her career help make departure seem possible while sharpening the conflict with Gianni, who protests that he cannot manage both work and the children.

Departure from her family

When Leda tells Gianni she is leaving him, she explains that she needs to understand who she is and what possibilities are truly hers. He first treats her decision as depression and seeks solutions, even calling her mother and insisting that she think of the children. Later, as he recognizes that she is lying about the reasons for her departure, he becomes angry and tells her to leave. Florence is not named as the destination of every stage of this rupture, but the academic life established around her returns there is part of the larger context in which she imagines another future.

Leda then leaves the children with Gianni and is gone for two months without calling. He searches for her from a distance; when she comes back, she returns only to pack her books and notes for good. That return is practical and final in its stated purpose: she does not come back to resume family life, but to collect the materials of her intellectual work. The books and notes make visible the life she is choosing to take with her, while the briefness of the visit underscores the separation from Bianca and Marta.

Florence in the later narrative

Years later, Florence still serves as a recognizable point of orientation. After dancing with Giovanni, the narrator is asked where she lives and answers that she lives in Florence. Nina responds nervously that she will come to see her. The exchange gives the city a present-tense role: it is not only the place associated with Leda’s remembered education and earlier departures, but also the destination Nina can imagine reaching.

The city’s recurring significance rests on this overlap of independence and connection. Leda’s move there at eighteen is remembered as part of becoming herself; the academic activity associated with her returns helps her build a life beyond the household; and the later exchange with Nina makes Florence a possible meeting point between women whose circumstances are not the same. The narrative does not offer a settled account of Florence as refuge or resolution. Instead, the city holds together the promise of distance and the continuing possibility of being sought out.