Via San Giacomo dei Capri is the family home from which Giovanna measures Naples and her changing place within it. High in Rione Alto, the street represents a protected domestic world, but it is also where private family speech escapes into the open, where estrangement takes shape, and where Giovanna repeatedly returns to confront what she would rather not see.

Setting and the city's social geography

The family’s apartment is at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. The street belongs to the upper part of the city that Giovanna knows first: a world of familiar streets, school friends, and visits to Villa Floridiana. Her parents’ movements give this geography a social edge. They willingly go as far as Vomero, but the lower city and the neighborhoods where her father’s relatives live feel remote to Giovanna, almost like another city. Visiting those relatives means descending through Naples, a journey her parents undertake with visible reluctance and anxiety.

The contrast becomes concrete when Giovanna eventually travels with her father toward the neighborhood where he grew up and where Vittoria still lives. He leaves the ring road for older streets and drives through bleak apartment blocks, industrial buildings, and the area around Pascone. His account of a childhood marked by poverty unsettles Giovanna’s assumptions about the origins her parents have kept at a distance. The trip turns the home street’s high position into more than a location: it is the starting point of a descent across boundaries of class, family memory, and belonging.

Home, privacy, and overheard speech

Within the apartment, the boundary between protection and exposure is fragile. At twelve, Giovanna studies in her room while her parents discuss her disappointing school results. Her father, believing the door is closed, says that adolescence is not the explanation for her difficulties; she is acquiring Vittoria’s face. Giovanna hears him and learns that the comparison carries a family history of hostility. The apartment, supposedly a secure childhood setting, becomes the place where an adult judgment reaches her without being addressed to her.

The home is also where her parents manage her access to the relatives below. Before visits, her mother urges her father to get ready and warns that the relatives will be angry if they are late. He puts aside his books and notebooks, dresses carefully, and remains tense, while her mother checks the family’s appearance. She tells Giovanna to pretend not to hear if Vittoria says something. These preparations teach the child that visiting her father’s family is not ordinary social contact but an encounter the adults expect to be difficult.

When Giovanna presses to meet Vittoria, her mother later brings an atlas into her room and shows her the route from Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Giovanna studies the map further in secret, tracing a long course through familiar and unfamiliar parts of Naples toward the Pianto cemetery and Pascone. The map makes the street a literal point of origin for her imagined journey, while her parents’ initial unwillingness to take the matter seriously sharpens her sense that she must act on her own.

The recurring point of return

The street remains the place to which Giovanna comes back after encounters that have changed her understanding of her family. After Vittoria promises that she will answer if Giovanna calls, Giovanna returns home and looks at herself in the closet mirror, convinced that the face she fears cannot be erased. She resolves not to spy on her parents again and not to see Vittoria, but the promise does not end the family conflict. Vittoria and the secrets surrounding the adults continue to shape the meaning of home even when she is absent from it.

Via San Giacomo dei Capri is also connected to the rupture between Giovanna’s parents and their friends. Mariano disappears from the street after a violent confrontation with her father, and Giovanna consequently sees Angela and Ida less often. Later, her parents’ separation unfolds through disputes over possessions at the family home. Her father demands notes from a desk drawer; her mother insists he will not take books, notebooks, or even his usual pen and typewriter. The apartment becomes the arena where intellectual and domestic life is divided along with the marriage.

A home that becomes a boundary

After her parents separate, Giovanna’s connection to the apartment turns increasingly inward. She conceals that she has failed to advance at school, avoids Angela and Ida, and prefers isolation. The home is not simply a refuge: it is where she hides her academic failure and where her mother’s distress becomes difficult for her to bear. When her father visits, their conversations remain limited, and his courteous greetings do little to restore their former closeness.

Giovanna later describes life shut up in San Giacomo dei Capri as intolerable, and she decides to leave for a trip she has misrepresented to her mother. This departure is another attempt to escape the emotional enclosure of home, not a resolution of the conflicts attached to it. Across the narrative, Via San Giacomo dei Capri links the sheltered childhood from which Giovanna first looks outward to the increasingly strained household she seeks to leave. Its importance lies in that double function: it is both the center of her family life and the boundary against which her desire to know, choose, and move for herself repeatedly presses.