Parental ban on Giovanna seeing Vittoria

The parental ban on Giovanna seeing Vittoria is a rule imposed in the aftermath of a family crisis, meant to keep the girl away from an aunt whom her parents regard as a danger to their household. It does not erase Giovanna’s fascination or loyalty: instead, it turns contact into a struggle over family allegiance, withheld knowledge, and the right to choose her own attachments.

Background and Family Distance

Before the ban, contact with her father’s relatives was already marked by distance. Giovanna knew her mother’s family through frequent, affectionate visits, but her father’s relatives appeared only at occasional weddings or funerals, in encounters that felt forced. Their neighborhood seemed like an unnamed world below the familiar heights of the Vomero: her parents descended into the lower city for work and study, but approached visits to his family with weariness and anxiety.

The journey to Vittoria’s neighborhood makes that separation concrete. On one Sunday visit, Giovanna’s father leaves the ring road for older streets and, as they pass bleak apartment blocks and industrial buildings, tells her that he was born and raised there and that his family was poor. He stops at a building where he had lived and where Vittoria still lives. The visit gives Giovanna a direct encounter with the origins her father had largely kept apart from their family life.

Contact and Divided Loyalties

Vittoria introduces Giovanna to her paternal relatives, calling the visit a meeting with her blood. She urges her niece to look closely and questions what Giovanna has been taught to see. The relatives welcome Giovanna warmly, call her Giannina, and treat her with an affection she has not experienced in her parents’ household. That name seems to release a more relaxed version of the girl, making the visits meaningful to her as well as to Vittoria.

The new family connection also places Giovanna between adults whose tensions she cannot fully interpret. At a gathering with Mariano and Costanza, she notices her mother’s reserve and Mariano’s unusually attentive manner. Later, when Giovanna stays overnight with Angela, she recalls a moment between her mother and Mariano and considers telling Vittoria, who has instructed her to observe closely. She decides not to report what she saw, fearing that Vittoria would turn it into an accusation. The episode shows how the aunt’s demand that Giovanna look and tell makes the child a potential witness in conflicts between adults.

The Ban and Its Immediate Effects

The crisis becomes public in a violent argument between Giovanna’s father and Mariano. Their dispute begins with familiar subjects such as politics and economics, but escalates into shouting; Costanza leaves, and Giovanna’s father runs after her. Giovanna, Angela, and Ida sense that the conflict concerns the adults’ relationships rather than their political discussions, but do not understand the full situation. Costanza later visits Giovanna’s home and returns a white-gold bracelet; after that visit, she and Mariano disappear from the family’s usual circle, and Giovanna sees Angela and Ida less often.

Her parents take almost two years to decide to separate, though they spend only brief periods under the same roof. During this interval, her father disappears for weeks at a time, later revealed to have been living in Posillipo with Costanza. When he returns, he and Giovanna’s mother attempt brief reconciliations before resuming their arguments. Through these cycles, they agree on one restriction: for Giovanna’s own good, she must not see Vittoria again. Giovanna does not challenge the order at first; she shares her parents’ view that she is exhausted by her aunt’s hatreds, desire for revenge, and influence.

Resistance, Return, and Significance

Vittoria does not immediately give up contact. She repeatedly calls and asks for Giannina, the name she uses for Giovanna. Giovanna lets the calls go unanswered and, when she does answer, hangs up. Although Vittoria’s strained voice can make her feel pity and curiosity, Giovanna keeps silent and gradually stops naming her aunt even to herself. The ban is enforced not just by her parents’ instruction but by Giovanna’s own effort to withdraw from a relationship she experiences as both compelling and burdensome.

That withdrawal proves incomplete. After falling in love with Roberto, whom she sees as difficult to reach, Giovanna decides that she should have a life of her own rather than constantly orienting herself around her parents’ reactions. She calls Vittoria, hoping both to resume contact and to find a way to see Roberto. Vittoria tells her that Giovanna’s mother had previously called to demand that she leave the girl alone. Furious at what she regards as an attempt to take Giovanna from her, Vittoria rejects Giovanna’s effort to reassure her of her loyalty and ends the call. The attempted breach of the ban therefore does not restore their closeness; it renews the conflict over who has a claim on Giovanna.

The prohibition exposes the family’s use of protection as a reason to control contact, while Giovanna’s changing responses reveal that obedience and attachment do not neatly coincide. At first she accepts distance as relief from Vittoria’s influence; later, loneliness and her desire for an independent life draw her back toward the aunt. The rule cannot settle the deeper disputes among the adults or make Giovanna an uninvolved child: it leaves her to navigate their competing claims, while the name Giannina continues to evoke a self she had briefly discovered among her father’s relatives.