Rione Alto is the high, familiar part of Naples where Giovanna grows up and where her newly married parents buy an apartment. Set above the city that her father’s family inhabits, it becomes more than a home address: its elevation marks the limits of Giovanna’s childhood world, while the journey down toward her paternal relatives brings her into contact with a family and a version of herself she has barely known.

Setting and Everyday Geography

The apartment stands at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. From the child’s perspective, the city is arranged vertically: her family lives high up, and going elsewhere means descending. The geography is practical as well as symbolic. Her parents willingly travel as far as Vomero, and, with some reluctance, to her maternal grandparents’ home in Museo; farther down, Naples begins to feel less like her own city.

The streets most familiar to Giovanna—Via Suarez, Piazza degli Artisti, Via Luca Giordano, Via Scarlatti, and Via Cimarosa—lead toward Villa Floridiana. Her mother took her to the park for fresh air and sunshine when she was an infant, and she later spent happy hours there with her childhood friends Angela and Ida. Plants, gardens, flowers, fragments of sea, games, and good manners color this upper-city landscape. By contrast, the lower districts her parents visit for work, shopping, study, and debate remain names she knows better from conversation than from experience.

A Boundary Between Families

Giovanna’s maternal relatives live in Museo, a place with a definite name and a familiar place in her life. Her father’s relatives, by contrast, seem to inhabit an undefined territory at the bottom of the city. Visiting them means going down and continuing down, a journey so long that the child imagines the two sides of the family as inhabitants of different cities. Her parents’ tiredness and anxiety on these trips deepen that impression; their familiar exchanges about getting ready become part of the emotional geography of the descent.

When her father eventually drives her into the neighborhood where he grew up, the landscape is not the green, cultivated world associated with Villa Floridiana. The route passes small, bleak apartment blocks, faded walls, industrial warehouses and sheds, garbage-strewn patches of green, and deep puddles left by recent rain. In this setting, her father tells her that his family was poor, then points out the brick building where he lived and where Aunt Vittoria still lives. The visit makes visible the distance between his origins and the comparatively settled world in which Giovanna has been raised.

Crossing the City, Meeting Her Relatives

Vittoria later takes Giovanna through Naples in a green Fiat 500 to meet her father’s siblings: Aunt Anna in Cavone, Uncle Nicola in Campi Flegrei, and Aunt Rosetta in Pozzuoli. The route turns the obscure realm of paternal kin into a series of actual homes and encounters. Giovanna realizes that she barely remembers the relatives and may never have known their names, but they welcome her warmly, calling her Giannina, a name her parents never use.

Their apartments are small and drab, furnished with objects Giovanna has been taught to judge crude or vulgar. Yet the relatives’ cordial mixture of dialect and Italian, their hospitality, and their evident care unsettle the judgments she has brought from home. No one asks after her father or tells her to greet him, signs of the family’s hostility toward him; still, they make clear that they do not hold Giovanna responsible. In this lower, unfamiliar Naples, she feels unusually open to affection and begins to imagine that being called Giannina has released a different, more relaxed and amusing self.

Narrative Significance

Rione Alto’s height organizes the story’s contrast between the world Giovanna knows and the family history she has scarcely encountered. The journey downward is not simply a change of scenery: it carries her from streets associated with childhood friendship and parental ease into places shaped by poverty, estrangement, and kinship. As she crosses that boundary, her inherited assumptions about refinement and vulgarity meet the warmth of her father’s relatives, and the name Giannina offers a glimpse of an identity not confined to the person she is at home.