Giuliana and Roberto’s love and engagement

Giuliana and Roberto’s love and engagement offer a counterpoint to the family’s fractures: their bond gives Giuliana the hope of leaving Naples and its limits, while Roberto’s acceptance allows her to change without having to become someone else. Yet the relationship is not an effortless escape. Giuliana’s longing for him is bound up with uncertainty, separation, and dependence on the judgment of others.

The relationship begins at a distance

Giuliana is introduced to the narrator as Roberto’s fiancée through Angela’s account of the young couple. Roberto is a friend of Angela’s boyfriend, Tonino; the four have gone out for pizza together. Angela calls Roberto ordinary and a little boring, and wonders why Giuliana, whom she considers pretty, feels so strongly about him. Her comparison is revealing: Tonino seems more handsome and intelligent to her, but Roberto commands his friend’s respect. The relationship is therefore first filtered through other people’s evaluations, before the narrator meets Roberto herself.

Distance and family authority shape the engagement. Giuliana tells the narrator that Vittoria does not want her to go to Milan to see Roberto. She has made the trip only three or four times, and only when Tonino accompanied her. Those visits nevertheless make her fall in love with the city: Roberto introduces her to his friends, including some important people, and takes her to their homes and to appointments. The welcome expands Giuliana’s sense of what might be possible, but it also intensifies her anxiety. Returning from these experiences, her heart keeps racing as she wonders why Roberto chose her when Milan has so many exceptional young women.

Roberto’s acceptance and Giuliana’s change

When Giuliana later calls the narrator, she is both cordial and unusually serious. She explains that Tonino told her the narrator wanted to call; she has called first because she is glad of the prospect of seeing her. Roberto will be in Naples the following week for a conference, and both of them want to meet. The call places their relationship in a new social setting: Roberto is not only a distant fiancé in Milan but someone about to reappear in the narrator’s life.

Giuliana rejects the assumption that her efforts to change are simply an attempt to win Roberto’s love. When the narrator suggests that it must be love, Giuliana answers, “If by love you mean Roberto, no, it’s not about Roberto.” She says she herself has felt the need to change, and that the effort is ongoing. Her account resists a simple romance plot in which a woman remakes herself to please a man: she describes a change she experiences as her own, even as she explains it through the people whose regard matters to her.

Roberto’s role in that change is defined by what he does not demand. Giuliana says he likes her whether she remains as she has been since childhood or changes; he does not prescribe her hair or clothes. She anticipates that the narrator may fear he is a bookish, intimidating man who lays down rules, but describes someone who learned without the solemn habits of a scholar, played ball in the street, and did ten things at once. To Giuliana, he has a remarkable capacity to transform whatever he touches. The description conveys her admiration, but it also makes clear that she regards his openness as a rare power.

Separation, dependence, and the future

Giuliana’s confidence in Roberto is inseparable from the future she imagines with him. She admires his benevolent determination and relies on him as the person who can take her away from her birthplace, inadequate schooling, her mother’s frailty, and Vittoria’s power. Milan consequently means more than a place she enjoys visiting: it represents an alternative to the conditions she feels have confined her. But access to that future is constrained by Vittoria, whose opposition limits Giuliana’s visits and remains a source of power in her life.

The engagement also exposes Giuliana’s habit of measuring herself against other women. She calls herself stupid and ignorant, says she does not know how to dress, and cannot understand why Roberto chose her when he could have chosen women in Milan. She compares herself unfavorably with the narrator and Angela, whom she sees as proper, articulate, pretty, or elegant. The narrator disputes the comparison, telling Giuliana that Roberto wanted her specifically, and offers help with what she is still learning. The exchange makes friendship part of the relationship’s emotional landscape: Giuliana’s security does not come from Roberto alone, but is also negotiated in conversation with the narrator.

Roberto’s approach to conflict further distinguishes him in Giuliana’s account. She predicts that she, Tonino, and Corrado will break with Vittoria, but Roberto will not: he will do what he has to do without breaking with anyone. This is not presented as a promise that he will simply defeat the family’s constraints. Rather, Giuliana admires a steadiness that does not depend on severing every difficult tie. Her love rests partly on the hope that such constancy can open a way forward where she feels hemmed in.

Meaning of the engagement

Giuliana and Roberto’s relationship joins emotional attachment to social possibility. The trips to Milan give Giuliana a glimpse of a wider world, but their rarity shows how little control she has over her movements; her hope of leaving is at once intensely personal and shaped by family power. Roberto’s acceptance gives her room to change without issuing instructions, while Giuliana’s insecurity makes that freedom hard for her to trust.

The engagement is thus neither a settled refuge nor a simple escape. Giuliana loves and admires Roberto, yet her imagined future with him carries the weight of schooling, classed judgments about taste and polish, and the authority of Vittoria. What she finds in him is not a guarantee that these pressures disappear, but a model of benevolent determination: a person who can remain himself while making space for her to become different.