Giovanna’s infatuation with Roberto

Giovanna’s infatuation with Roberto is a sudden attachment that reorganizes her hopes before she knows him. First seeing him at a church gathering, she experiences desire as a physical jolt and a need so urgent that she imagines prayer as the one thing that can keep her alive. The feeling then becomes a sustained private project: she idealizes Roberto, tries to imagine what would protect his singularity, and hopes that friendship might give her a place in his life despite his existing relationship, his distance in Milan, and the family tensions surrounding access to him.

The first encounter

Giovanna is almost fifteen when Roberto appears at a gathering in Pascone. Until then, no boy has truly attracted her—not Corrado, and not Rosario. Roberto has not yet spoken when she feels a violent pain in her chest and concludes that her life is about to change. The speed matters: her conviction precedes any knowledge of his character or any exchange between them. She wants him at once, imagines that she will necessarily have to have him, and promises herself that she will pray every day and night for this wish. Though she says she does not believe in God, the hope of Roberto becomes powerful enough to summon prayer as an urgent form of appeal.

The first impression is shaped by the way she sees him, not by evidence of mutual intimacy. She takes in his blue eyes, dark face, rebellious hair, and beard, but the narrative stresses the force of her response rather than a conversation or action on his part. In the instant of recognition, Roberto becomes both a person she wants and the answer to a need she has not yet understood. The gap between the intensity of her feeling and the scantness of what she knows about him is the defining condition of the infatuation.

From upheaval to imagined knowledge

After the initial shock, Giovanna identifies the experience as falling in love at first sight, although she avoids using that phrase to herself. Instead, she treats Roberto’s face, voice, and hands around hers as a kind of miraculous consolation for her agitated days and nights. The language of consolation gives the attachment a function beyond romantic longing: imagining him steadies a life she experiences as unsettled.

She is also capable of naming the obstacles. Roberto is a man and she is a girl; he loves someone else, whom Giovanna regards as beautiful and good; he lives in Milan; and she knows little about what matters to him. The only practical route to seeing him again runs through Vittoria, whose presence in Giovanna’s life is complicated and whose visits cause pain for Giovanna’s mother. Giovanna initially lets time pass, weighing her wish against those barriers, but decides that she has a right to a life of her own rather than endlessly organizing it around her parents’ reactions.

When Giovanna does contact Vittoria, she discovers that her mother has called to tell her not to see Giovanna again. Vittoria responds with anger and rejects the idea that Giovanna’s return of the bracelet would make everything right. Giovanna tries to call back and tell her that she is on her side, but Vittoria does not answer. The failed attempt leaves Giovanna depressed: at that moment she needs Vittoria’s affection and fears that, without her, she may lose her chance to see Roberto. Her pursuit of him is therefore entangled with a separate attachment and conflict; the hoped-for meeting depends on the very family relationship now under strain.

Roberto as an ideal

In the days that follow, Giovanna turns Roberto into a distant, carefully drawn figure. She imagines him as a bluish silhouette contained within heavy lines, and believes that no one in Pascone has seen him as clearly as she did in the church. She knows he was born and raised there and is Tonino’s childhood friend, but she interprets the community’s admiration as attachment to his origins and his success rather than to his individuality. His schooling in Milan and his distinction from the bleak surroundings of the Industrial Zone become part of the story she tells herself about him.

That interpretation produces a protective fantasy. Giovanna thinks Roberto should not be treated as an ordinary person with special abilities, and imagines keeping him outside the world of Vittoria, Margherita, and Corrado, whose influence she fears could spoil him or obscure the reasons he chose her. She even imagines that, if she were Giuliana, she would urge him to leave with her and go to Milan. These are not plans based on a shared understanding; they are scenarios built around the conviction that Roberto is exceptional and needs someone able to recognize and care for that exceptionality.

Giovanna places herself inside this imagined role as his potential friend and guardian. She thinks that, if she became his friend, she would spare him unnecessary encounters with her mother and especially her father. She believes she could take care of the energy she senses in him and provide what he needs. The fantasy thus shifts from simply wanting Roberto to wanting to be uniquely qualified to understand him: friendship becomes both a more attainable aim than romance and a means of preserving the importance she has assigned him.

Friendship as a declared aim

Giovanna’s stated purpose is friendship, even as her private hopes remain much more intense. She says she wants to read the Gospels because there is a boy she likes who knows them well. When asked whether she is in love, she denies it, pointing out that he has a girlfriend and insisting that she only wants to be his friend. She also asks that her father not be told, since she expects him to turn the reading into a discussion and spoil it. The exchange makes her feelings legible through what she tries to conceal: she presents an aspiration to friendship while guarding the interest that has prompted it.

Later, Angela tells Giovanna that Giuliana considers her extraordinary and that Roberto’s opinion is said to be similar. Giovanna does not simply accept this as proof of intimacy. She wonders whether the praise is sincere or meant to be kind and strengthen the relationship, and describes herself instead as a rock with a hidden, elemental life. Her uncertainty reveals how little direct assurance she has from Roberto: his supposed admiration reaches her through others, and she cannot decide what it means.

The prospect of meeting him again sharpens both desire and anxiety. When Giuliana arranges for Giovanna to meet her in Piazza Amedeo the following Sunday, with Roberto there too, Giovanna feels that the long-imagined moment has arrived and becomes frightened. Giuliana reassures her and asks her to come as a friend who studies and speaks well. The arrangement offers the concrete possibility Giovanna has wanted, but it also exposes the distance between her inward drama and the ordinary terms on which the meeting is organized. Her infatuation remains a mixture of idealization, self-doubt, and a hope for closeness that she can name only as friendship.