The Childhood Trio Changes Shape

This thread follows Giovanna’s friendships with Angela and Ida as childhood intimacy gives way to secrecy, jealousy, estrangement, and a tentative renewal.

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A Shared Upbringing

Three Girls Together A common world Giovanna Trada, Angela, and Ida grow up under parents who share educational ideals and a belief in frank conversation. The girls read widely, receive early explanations about their bodies, and learn to treat their female identities as a source of pride. Intimacy and rivalry Their closeness is not perfectly equal: Angela is Giovanna’s closest friend, while Ida is younger and often surprises the others with her reading and writing. Still, disagreements can usually be spoken through and repaired. That shared upbringing makes the girls seem to Giovanna like reliable witnesses to her changing appearance. When she fears she is becoming ugly, their friendship initially functions as a place where she can seek reassurance without appealing only to her parents.

The First Private Lies

Stories Kept from Home A new confidence Giovanna begins withholding details about Vittoria from her parents and embellishing her encounters when she speaks with Angela and Ida. The sisters are fascinated by the family stories, Vittoria’s love for Enzo, and the children Giovanna has met in Pascone. Invention becomes intimacy Giovanna’s stories grow more elaborate, sometimes turning the family into the material of a romance or fairy tale. She admits to Angela and Ida that she has lied about a spectacular bracelet and about posing before a mirror in jewelry. The girls’ interest gives Giovanna pleasure and an audience for the secret life she is building. But the stories also create a gap between experience and performance: her friends are becoming attached not only to Giovanna but to a version of the world she has shaped for them.

Friendship Strained by Secrets

Competing Claims The wish to meet Vittoria Angela and Ida press Giovanna to introduce them to Vittoria and the family she has described. Giovanna resists because she fears reality will disappoint them and because she suspects her parents’ permission to see Vittoria is more fragile than it appears. A different kind of confidence Giovanna increasingly uses her friends to tell stories and conceal her distress, while keeping the family crisis from them. Their requests and her secrecy make her feel divided between the world she shares with them and the one she has entered through Vittoria. The friendship remains important, but it is no longer the uncomplicated refuge of childhood. Giovanna’s private loyalties and inventions begin to reshape what she can honestly share with Angela and Ida.

Separation and Rivalry

Three Friends Apart Family scandal reaches the girls When Andrea and Mariano’s friendship collapses and Costanza returns the bracelet, Angela and Ida lose their easy access to Giovanna. The girls talk by telephone, but none of them can openly make sense of the adult relationships that have transformed their homes. Affection mixed with resentment Angela later tells Giovanna about Tonino and resents being separated from her; Ida says she wants her own father and rejects the idea that the girls are becoming sisters. Giovanna, absorbed in grief and anger, answers sparingly and withdraws further. The rupture among their families turns childhood friendship into a difficult relationship among adolescents. Each girl wants closeness, but each is also coping with a family reality that the others cannot simply restore or explain.

A Fragile Reunion

Returning to One Another Reconnection at Posillipo Costanza brings Giovanna to Ida’s birthday gathering, and the three girls quickly recover some joking ease despite the time apart. Angela and Ida have changed, and Angela’s relationship with Tonino has become part of their shared but uneasy history. Ida’s story and the Venice plan After Giovanna returns from Milan, she meets Ida in the Floridiana. Ida admits that she wants to leave school and write, then reads a story about a younger girl who secretly listens to two older friends kissing and cries because she feels excluded. Giovanna recognizes the pain inside Ida’s fiction and kisses her, answering the story with a physical gesture of closeness. The two then consider going to Venice together, a renewed bond grounded not in a return to childhood but in their uncertain plans for adulthood.

Before Giovanna’s adolescent crisis

After Giovanna meets Vittoria

During the fall after Giovanna begins spying on her parents

After Costanza returns the bracelet

After Giovanna passes the repeated school year