Giovanna and Ida set off for Venice

Giovanna and Ida set off for Venice the day after Giovanna’s first sexual experience with Rosario, but the journey is not simply an escape toward sex or romance. Ida’s confession of childhood loneliness has just drawn the friends into a new intimacy; Giovanna decides she has no urgent need to lose her virginity, calls Ida instead, and the two leave together with a promise to become adults differently from those around them.

The decision to travel

The plan takes shape after Giovanna recognizes that she does not need to lose her virginity at once. Rosario attracts her for reasons she cannot explain, but she does not call him. Instead she phones Ida to ask whether she has decided to go to Venice. Ida is ready: she has spoken to her mother, Costanza, who is glad to have her away for a while and gives her plenty of money. Giovanna’s choice shifts the immediate center of the trip from sexual initiation to companionship.

The practical arrangements underline that this is a journey the young women organize for themselves. Giovanna has already spent the money her mother gave her for her birthday when she went to Milan, so she presses her mother for more, this time on the pretext of her promotion. She then calls Tonino at the restaurant where he works. He initially sounds pleased, but when he learns that Ida is coming, he hesitates: he lives in a small room in Mestre and says that three people cannot stay there. Giovanna tells him they are coming to say hello regardless, and that they will manage whether or not he wants to meet. Tonino changes his tone and says he will be expecting them.

Ida’s story and their renewed intimacy

The journey follows an intimate exchange in which Ida brings out a red-covered notebook and reads a short story she has wanted to share with Giovanna for a long time. In the story, two sisters have a friend who often sleeps at their house. The older sister waits until the younger one has fallen asleep, then slips into the guest’s bed to sleep beside her. The younger sister fights sleep, pained by her exclusion, but eventually pretends to be asleep so she can listen to the older girls whispering and kissing. She keeps up the pretense night after night; when the other two finally fall asleep, she weeps because she feels that nobody loves her.

Ida reads quickly and precisely, without looking up or meeting Giovanna’s eyes. When she finishes, she breaks down crying, like the lonely girl in the story. Giovanna dries her tears and kisses her on the mouth, even as two mothers pass nearby pushing baby carriages and talking. The story is therefore more than a piece of writing: Ida’s controlled reading gives way to a disclosure of feeling, and Giovanna answers with a physical gesture of tenderness. Their departure comes directly after this moment of exposure and response, making the friendship—not the prospect of sex—the emotional ground of the trip.

From a sexual decision to a shared departure

On the morning they are to leave, Rosario calls at nine. He appears to have heard from Corrado that Giovanna has finally made up her mind, and approaches her as though her decision to have sex is settled. Yet Giovanna’s earlier choice to call Ida rather than Rosario has already complicated that assumption. Rosario’s call arrives as the pair are preparing to go, and the sequence keeps the Venice plan distinct from her sexual initiation: the journey is not postponed until she has resolved her uncertainty or made herself available to him.

The next day, Giovanna leaves for Venice with Ida. On the train they promise each other that they will become adults as no one ever has before. The promise does not specify what adulthood will look like, but its scale is striking beside the concrete arrangements that made the trip possible: borrowed money, a call to Tonino, and an uncertain place to stay in Mestre. It casts travel as an experiment in self-definition, undertaken together rather than through submission to someone else’s timetable for growing up.

Significance of the departure

The Venice trip gathers together two forms of independence that the narrative has kept in tension. Giovanna has approached sexual adulthood through anxiety and a desire to prove something, but, after hearing Ida’s story and comforting her, she recognizes that there is no urgency to make sex the measure of maturity. At the same time, the friends’ departure is not a rejection of desire or of the future: they are going to see Tonino, and the trip remains open to what may happen there. What changes is the immediate priority. Giovanna chooses a friend’s company and a shared journey before choosing a sexual milestone.

Their vow on the train is both hopeful and deliberately broad. Rather than accepting adulthood as something already modeled for them, Giovanna and Ida imagine becoming adults in a way no one before them has managed. The narrative gives that aspiration no guaranteed outcome; it gives the girls a direction and a bond with which to pursue it. Venice begins, accordingly, not with arrival or a solved problem, but with two friends leaving together after one has been heard and the other has answered.