Naples

Naples is the novel’s social landscape as well as its physical setting: its elevations, descents, neighborhoods, and changing views make family division and class difference tangible. Giovanna first experiences the city through the sheltered heights of the Vomero, then discovers that her father’s relatives inhabit a world her parents have kept at a distance. As she crosses that boundary, Naples becomes a measure of both inherited separation and possible belonging.

A city divided by elevation and familiarity

Giovanna’s childhood map of Naples is sharply uneven. Her family lives high above the city, and the neighborhoods she knows best are those around the Vomero: her parents’ friends live along streets such as Via Suarez, Piazza degli Artisti, Via Luca Giordano, Via Scarlatti, and Via Cimarosa. These names lead toward Villa Floridiana, where her mother once took her for air and sunshine and where Giovanna spent happy hours with Angela and Ida. This upper city is associated with gardens, flowers, fragments of sea, play, and good manners; it is not simply a location but the landscape of an early, protected sense of home.

The city below is familiar in name but less familiar in experience. Giovanna knows that her parents descend by funicular to Chiaia and Toledo, and onward to Piazza Plebiscito, the Biblioteca Nazionale, Port’Alba, Via Ventaglieri, Via Foria, and sometimes Piazza Carlo III. Her parents speak of these destinations, but rarely take her there. The farther Naples spreads across the lower ground, the less it seems to belong to her. Her father’s relatives live farther down still, in an area she initially understands as nameless and difficult to reach, almost a different city from her own.

That division is reinforced by the family’s habits. Giovanna’s maternal relatives live in Museo, a place with a definite name and a remembered history of affectionate visits. Her paternal relatives, by contrast, remain vague in her imagination, appearing only at weddings or funerals, amid strained greetings and forced kisses. The family’s geographical separation has become emotional custom: her parents’ tension on the way to visit the relatives teaches Giovanna to feel the descent as an unwelcome passage before she knows much about the people at its end.

The descent into her father’s origins

When Giovanna finally travels with her parents to see Vittoria, the journey gives the family division a visible route. After days of rain, her father drives off the ring road because he prefers the old streets. The landscape changes into rows of small, bleak apartment buildings, faded walls, industrial warehouses and sheds, patches of green choked with rubbish, and puddles left by the rain. The air is described as putrid. As the car moves into this harsher environment, her father grows somber, then begins, for the first time, to speak about where he came from.

He tells Giovanna that he was born and grew up in the neighborhood and that his family was poor. In a bleaker quarter, he points out the brick building where he lived and where Vittoria still lives; patches of plaster are missing from its facade. The disclosure alters the meaning of the journey. The place her parents had treated as an exhausting obligation is also the setting of her father’s childhood, and the poverty he names stands in marked contrast to the elevated domestic world in which Giovanna was raised. The city’s change in altitude and architecture makes this contrast legible before she has a fuller account of the family’s past.

Meeting the paternal family

Vittoria later takes Giovanna on an unannounced tour of her father’s siblings and their households. In a green Fiat 500, they travel first to Cavone to visit Aunt Anna, then to the Campi Flegrei to see Uncle Nicola, and then to Pozzuoli to visit Aunt Rosetta. Vittoria calls the excursion a meeting with Giovanna’s blood. The route joins several neighborhoods and households into a family network that Giovanna had scarcely known existed.

The relatives’ homes are small and drab, furnished with objects that Giovanna has been taught to regard as crude or vulgar. There are few books; Aunt Anna’s home contains some mysteries. Yet the reception she receives unsettles her inherited judgments. The relatives speak cordially in dialect mixed with Italian, and Giovanna tries to meet them in their speech, making room for Neapolitan cadences in her careful Italian. They do not ask after her father or demand that she pass along a greeting, signs that they remain hostile to him, but they make clear that they do not blame her. Their welcome gives her a kind of kinship she had not experienced in her parents’ carefully managed social world.

The names they use deepen that change. They call her Giannina, as Vittoria does, rather than Giovanna, the name used by her parents, Angela, Ida, and her classmates. Among them she feels relaxed, affectionate, and funny; she imagines that Giannina has brought forth another version of herself from the same body. The transformation is not a literal change of identity but a change in how she can inhabit it: in these lower-city homes, a different name and a different manner of speaking make room for a self not organized around her parents’ expectations.

Vittoria makes the visits into a lesson in looking. She rebukes Giovanna for seeming to look without seeing what might disturb her and repeatedly urges her to look closely at the differences between her relatives and her parents. Her own gestures give emphasis to the value she places on heartfelt affection. The relatives’ welcome, their small rooms, their dialect, and their unembarrassed warmth become evidence Giovanna must interpret for herself. The contrast does not erase the hostility between the two sides of the family, but it makes clear that estrangement has kept her from people who are capable of loving her.

A city of separation and return

Naples continues to frame family conflict after Giovanna has crossed into this previously unfamiliar world. During her parents’ prolonged crisis, she fears that her father has taken his life in some dark, squalid part of the city. Only later does she learn that he has instead been living comfortably in a beautiful house in Posillipo, given to Costanza by her parents. The contrast between the feared, unknown city and the actual comfort of Posillipo exposes how little Giovanna can know from appearances or from the anxious stories she constructs around absence.

When she visits her father there, the move from Via San Giacomo dei Capri has not cost him much elevation, but it has gained him beauty: from the house, Giovanna can see a wide expanse of Naples, the sky, and Vesuvius. This view reverses the emotional meaning of the earlier descent. Naples is no longer only the unfamiliar lower ground that her parents were reluctant to enter; from Posillipo it becomes a panorama, a city that can be taken in from a distance. Yet the beauty does not resolve the ruptures inside the family or make the different parts of the city socially interchangeable.

For Giovanna, the upper city’s familiar spaces also become places of withdrawal. As family tragedy draws Angela and Ida away from her, she spends time on the steps behind the high school and in Villa Floridiana, among paths and hedges she once walked with her mother and friends. She sits looking beyond the low wall toward the gardens of Villa Santarella, or from a bench toward the sea and the whole city, without truly seeing what is before her. The remembered ease of these places gives her a refuge, but their changed meaning registers her isolation: the same landscape that once held childhood companionship now holds her alone.

Belonging, class, and the city’s claims

The differences between Giovanna’s upbringing and Giuliana’s are also expressed through Naples. Giuliana tells her to think not only of how Giovanna grew up, but of Vittoria, her mother, and the bleak place where she herself was raised. What seems possible to Giovanna is not equally available to Giuliana. Her frustration makes the city more than a backdrop to their disagreements: their different neighborhoods and family circumstances shape what each can imagine as an escape, and what each understands as obligation.

Giuliana longs to leave Pascone and Naples, marry Roberto, and live in Milan in a home of her own. To her, Roberto’s sense of a debt to his birthplace risks tying him to the city she wants to escape. She describes Naples as a place she must get out of, while Roberto’s return to it appears to her as a choice that could prevent the peaceful life she wants. In her account, the city gathers the pressure of Vittoria’s continuing conflicts, the claims of family, and the limits imposed by where she grew up.

Roberto’s relation to the city supplies a counterpoint. Giovanna’s father calls Naples a wretched city from which Roberto was fortunate to escape in order to build an academic career in Milan. Giuliana, too, sees Milan as the destination where she might begin a different life. But Roberto understands his connection to his birthplace as a debt, and Giuliana recognizes that this attachment may matter more to him than it does to her. Naples therefore holds competing meanings: a constraining home from which some characters wish to depart, a source of social and family conflict, and a place whose claims can persist even after a person has left.

The novel’s city is ultimately defined by movement and unequal access. Giovanna’s childhood descent to her father’s relatives opens a boundary her parents had helped preserve; the journey through Cavone, the Campi Flegrei, and Pozzuoli turns unknown kin into people she can encounter and love. Later journeys to Posillipo and returns to Villa Floridiana attach new meanings to familiar views. Elevation, distance, architecture, transport, and speech do not merely decorate Naples: they shape who feels at home, who is treated as an outsider, and what kinds of future seem possible. The city’s routes make family history visible while refusing to reduce its people to the places they inhabit.