Giovanna Trada

Giovanna Trada’s first encounters with her father’s relatives turn Naples’s steep geography into a map of family estrangement, then make that estrangement intimate. In the lower city, amid relatives her parents have kept at a distance, she finds a welcome that loosens her familiar sense of herself; called Giannina, she feels as if another, more affectionate self has come into being.

Identity and Family Background

Two years before leaving home, Giovanna’s father quietly told her mother that their daughter was very ugly. The remembered sentence fixes itself in the apartment her newly married parents had bought at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. Yet the adult narrator does not treat recollection as a route to a settled self: within the lines meant to give her a story, she describes herself as a tangled knot, uncertain whether it contains a thread or only suffering without redemption. The gap between the child judged by her father and the narrator trying to make a story of that judgment establishes identity as both inherited and unresolved.

That uncertainty takes spatial form in Giovanna’s knowledge of her relatives. Her mother’s family had a definite home in Museo, and she had seen them often before her grandparents died and her uncle moved away. Her father’s family, by contrast, appeared only at weddings and funerals, amid strained greetings and displays of affection that felt forced. Giovanna knew little about them, and her parents seemed to put those visits aside afterward as though they had taken part in a shabby performance.

Naples and the Descent to Her Father’s Family

Giovanna’s early map of Naples is divided by elevation and familiarity. She lives in the city’s highest part, and going anywhere means descending. The Vomero, the streets around her parents’ friends, and Villa Floridiana belong to her childhood world of gardens, sea glimpses, flowers, games, and good manners; it is also where she spent happy hours with Angela and Ida. Her parents travel farther down for work, shopping, study, and discussion, taking the funiculars toward Chiaia and Toledo and onward to the Biblioteca Nazionale, Port’Alba, Via Ventaglieri, Via Foria, and sometimes Piazza Carlo III. Giovanna knows these place names from conversation, but they do not carry the happiness of the places she has visited.

The districts where her father’s relatives live remain more remote still: nameless, hard to reach, and in her imagination almost wild. Her parents, normally energetic, become weary and anxious when they have to go. When the family finally drives there after days of rain, her father rejects the ring road for older streets. Beyond the windshield, rows of small bleak apartment buildings, faded walls, industrial sheds, garbage, deep puddles, and putrid air replace the city Giovanna knows. Her father points out the neighborhood where he grew up, says his family was poor, and stops outside a brick building with large patches of missing plaster, where he lived and where Vittoria still lives. The journey is not just a visit: it gives Giovanna a first, physical view of the origins her father has largely kept outside their home life.

Vittoria and the Work of Looking

When Giovanna introduces herself as her aunt’s niece, Vittoria accepts the name Giovanna but rejects the form of address: if Giovanna calls her aunt again, Vittoria says, she had better turn around and leave. Frightened, Giovanna studies Vittoria’s unmade-up face and then looks down. Vittoria’s beauty seems so overwhelming that Giovanna feels compelled to call her ugly instead. Even their first meeting thus makes looking unstable: the girl sees, recoils, and reaches for a judgment that might protect her from what she sees.

Later, Vittoria takes Giovanna to meet her father’s siblings without warning. They visit Uncle Nicola, who works on the railroad, and Aunt Anna and Aunt Rosetta, both housewives; the family travels in Vittoria’s green Fiat 500, from Cavone to the Campi Flegrei and then Pozzuoli. Vittoria calls the excursion a meeting with Giovanna’s blood. She also notices that Giovanna barely remembers these relatives and attacks her brother for keeping their affection from his daughter, describing them as unpolished but warm-hearted. Striking her large breasts with her broad hand and gnarled fingers, Vittoria makes the heart visible as a matter of gesture as well as feeling.

Vittoria urges Giovanna to compare the relatives with her parents and to look at what each family is like. She accuses Giovanna of having blinders, of seeing without recognizing what might disturb her, and hammers home the command to look. This instruction gives the visits a purpose beyond reunion: Giovanna is being asked to examine the judgments and omissions through which her parents have defined their family world.

Giannina and the Experience of Belonging

The relatives’ homes are small and drab, furnished with objects Giovanna has been taught to consider crude or vulgar; apart from a few mysteries at Aunt Anna’s, she sees no books. But their welcome contradicts the hierarchy encoded in those judgments. They speak to her in cordial dialect mixed with Italian, and she tries to meet them partway, making room for Neapolitan cadences in her hypercorrect Italian. They neither ask after her father nor send greetings to him, signs of hostility toward him, yet they take care to show that they do not blame Giovanna.

They call her Giannina, as Vittoria does and as her parents never have. In their company Giovanna feels open, relaxed, and funny, and begins to imagine that the name has brought forth a different person from the body known as Giovanna at home and at school. The change is not a simple escape from one identity into another: it arises in a specific relationship to people who welcome her without making her answer for her father. When Uncle Nicola learns that she likes strawberry gelato, he sends one of his children to buy it for everyone; when the visit ends, he kisses her forehead and says that she has nothing of her father in her. The kindness confirms her welcome even as it draws a sharp line between her and the man whose family she has just met.

Narrative Significance

Giovanna’s visits make belonging both a matter of blood and something that must be experienced. Her father’s relatives are connected to her by descent, but her parents’ uneasy silences and infrequent visits have made them almost strangers. Vittoria’s insistence on looking and the relatives’ spontaneous affection give Giovanna a way to encounter that connection for herself, rather than simply inherit her parents’ distance from it.

The contrast between Giovanna and Giannina also shows how a name can register the effect of a place and a welcome. The lower city’s modest apartments do not match the standards by which she has learned to judge refinement, but there she becomes more at ease and more receptive to affection than she is in her familiar world. Her early trajectory therefore moves downward through Naples while opening outward into an unsettled family identity: what she sees there complicates both her father’s separation from his relatives and her own idea of who she can be.