Naples

Naples is both Leda’s place of origin and the home she tried to escape, a city she feared would draw her daughters into the family history she had struggled to leave behind. Her later recognition that its people and ways remained part of her makes Naples more than a distant birthplace: it is the contested inheritance connecting her past to Bianca and Marta’s upbringing.

A City Left Behind

At thirteen or fourteen, Leda began aspiring to bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, and a cultured life. Naples seemed to her a force that could overwhelm her, associated with the violent and degrading forms of life she had known as a child. At eighteen she left to study in Florence, which felt distant and foreign. In retrospect, she understood her departure as an attempt to tear away from the source of pain itself, rather than only from its outward signs.

The Family Home and the Daughters’ Return

When Leda left her daughters, she feared that Gianni might take Bianca and Marta to Naples and leave them with her mother and relatives. She pleaded with him not to do so, but he asserted that he had the right to decide what happened to his daughters. Although he cared for them, work pressures and travel sometimes led him to leave them at Leda’s Mother’s apartment in Naples for months. It was the apartment where Leda had been born, a place she remembered as part of the environment from which she had fought to free herself.

Inheritance and Estrangement

News that the girls were staying in Naples distressed Leda, but she did not return. She felt far away and believed she had become another person, finally her real self, even as she knew her daughters were being exposed to what she regarded as the city’s wounds. Leda’s fear centered not only on their location but on the possibility that they would absorb the habits and language she had tried to remove from herself after leaving Naples.

Naples Within Leda’s Family

After reclaiming Bianca and Marta and bringing them to Florence, Leda accused her mother of having marked the girls as she had marked Leda. She later recognized those accusations as unjust, while the conflict revealed how intensely she wanted her daughters to depend only on her. When Gianni went to Canada, Leda’s sense that she alone had nourished the girls strengthened; she understood their inheritance through the female line of her family, for both good and ill. Their difficulties at school intensified her anxiety, and she pressed them not to return to the life she associated with Naples. The city thus persists in the novel as a source of belonging and fear at once: the place Leda rejected, yet could not keep outside herself or her daughters’ lives.