Vittoria

Vittoria, Giovanna’s paternal aunt, is at once a guide into a hidden branch of the family and a volatile presence whose love can arrive as accusation, instruction, or physical intrusion. Through her, Giovanna encounters relatives and neighborhoods her parents had kept at a distance; through their repeated breaks and reunions, she discovers how the family’s shared roots can produce both tenderness and hostility. Vittoria’s insistence that Giovanna look closely becomes one of the novel’s central lessons, but the aunt’s own fierce vision is inseparable from her grievances and her demand for loyalty.

Identity and Background

Giovanna first knows her father’s relatives as an obscure world far below the family’s home on the Vomero. Her maternal grandparents had lived in Museo, a named and familiar place; her father’s kin seemed to occupy no precise location at all. Visiting them meant descending through Naples into districts that appeared to Giovanna almost like another city. Her parents usually moved willingly through the Vomero and its familiar streets, while the journeys to the paternal family made them weary and anxious. The geography gives physical form to the estrangement: the relatives are not simply unknown, but belong to a social and emotional world Giovanna has been taught to approach reluctantly.

Before Giovanna meets Vittoria, her mother frames the visit as a cautionary exercise, urging her to see what her aunt is like so that she can avoid becoming like her. The father’s account of his origins complicates that judgment. On the drive into the neighborhood, he recalls being born and raised among rows of modest apartment buildings, then points out the building where he lived and where Vittoria still lives. His description of a poor childhood places the aunt within a family history that his adult autonomy and silence have obscured. The scene makes Giovanna’s first approach to Vittoria an encounter not only with a difficult relative but with the origins her father has largely left behind.

Bringing Giovanna into the Family

Vittoria turns kinship into an itinerary. Without much warning, she takes Giovanna around Naples to meet her father’s siblings: Uncle Nicola, who works on the railroad; Aunt Anna, whose husband is a printer at Il Mattino; and Aunt Rosetta, married to a postal worker. They travel in Vittoria’s green Fiat 500, visiting Cavone, Campi Flegrei, and Pozzuoli. Vittoria calls the excursion a meeting with Giovanna’s blood, making family belonging something to be seen and experienced rather than merely asserted.

The visit exposes how little Giovanna knows. She can barely remember these relatives and may never have learned their names. Vittoria responds by criticizing Giovanna’s father for depriving her of the warmth of people who may lack education or polished manners but possess generous hearts. At the same time, she teaches Giovanna to examine the contrast between this family and her parents. She accuses the girl of looking without seeing, as though wearing blinders, and hammers home her demand to look carefully. The instruction is both a challenge to her parents’ version of the family and an attempt to recruit Giovanna into Vittoria’s own judgment of them.

The relatives welcome Giovanna with a familiarity that unsettles her expectations. Their apartments are small and drab, with furnishings she has been taught to consider crude; there are few books, though she finds mysteries at Aunt Anna’s. They speak in a cordial mixture of dialect and Italian, and Giovanna tries to meet them partway, making room for Neapolitan cadences in her hypercorrect Italian. They do not ask her to pass greetings to her father, a sign of hostility toward him, but they make clear that their anger is not directed at her. They call her Giannina, the intimate name Vittoria uses and the name her parents never gave her. Giovanna feels unusually open, relaxed, and funny among them, as if the name has brought forth a different self. The family’s welcome also reveals Vittoria’s place within it: her siblings and in-laws treat her tenderly, especially Uncle Nicola, who remembers her fondness for strawberry gelato and sends for it when he learns that Giovanna likes it too.

Estrangement, Calls, and the Bracelet

After her parents’ marital crisis, Vittoria disappears from Giovanna’s life, and both parents agree that the girl should not see her again. Giovanna does not resist the ban at first. She is exhausted by what Vittoria has poured out on her—her hatreds, need for revenge, and language—and hopes the aunt’s hold over her will weaken. Yet Vittoria begins calling every day at the same time, except Sundays, asking for Giannina. Giovanna holds her breath, avoids answering, and sometimes calls out that she is not there. When the calls become less frequent, she begins to answer without the same anxiety, only for Vittoria to return unexpectedly to the line.

The calls make separation feel less like a clean break than a repeated test. Giovanna sometimes hears suffering in Vittoria’s weary voice and feels pity; when depressed, she is tempted to answer and demand an explanation of what Vittoria has done to her parents. But she keeps silent and eventually gets used to not naming her aunt even to herself. She also puts away the bracelet, no longer wearing it, though remembering it still brings a physical pang and thoughts she cannot dispel. The object keeps the family’s concealed history present: Giovanna wonders how her father and Costanza could have loved each other for so long without her mother or Mariano knowing, and what the affair means for the people around them.

When Giovanna later visits Vittoria intending to return the bracelet, the planned purpose collapses almost as soon as the door opens. Vittoria confronts her with a long, aggressive, sorrowful monologue. The bracelet, Giovanna realizes, has been an excuse: Vittoria is attached to her, believes Giovanna loves her, and wants to punish her for disappointment. Vittoria says she had expected Giovanna to take her side after seeing what sort of people her parents were. She resents the girl’s long failure to visit or call and reads the letter accompanying the bracelet as an insult, emphasizing that Giovanna can write while she herself cannot. She calls Giovanna like her father, worse than him, without respect or feeling, and finally says that the girl does not share her blood and is a stranger. Her earlier language of blood and welcome thus reverses into a claim of exclusion.

Reunions and the Demand for Loyalty

The rupture does not last. When Giovanna phones Vittoria seeking a way to see Roberto, she learns that her mother had called after the lie about Caserta and told Vittoria to leave her alone. Vittoria is furious, insults her sister-in-law, and threatens to wait outside the house and stab her. She insists that Giovanna’s whole family is taking away her reasons for living and warns the girl not to call again if she is on her parents’ side. Giovanna tries to call back to say that she is angry about her mother’s intervention and is on Vittoria’s side, but the aunt does not answer. The failed repair leaves Giovanna depressed and afraid that losing Vittoria will also close off her chance of seeing Roberto.

Later, before taking Giuliana to see Roberto, Giovanna goes first to Vittoria, suspecting that her aunt has arranged the errand and might withdraw it if Giovanna does not appear affectionately subordinate. Their closeness remains conditional and difficult to read. Giovanna thinks Vittoria’s affection overwhelms her when she recognizes herself in the girl, while signs of Giovanna’s father make Vittoria suspect that she may repeat the harm her brother caused. Giovanna recognizes a matching instability in herself: Vittoria seems extraordinary when she imagines becoming a combative adult, repulsive when she sees her father’s traits in the aunt. She understands that neither Vittoria, her father, nor she can cut away their common roots, and that, depending on the circumstances, each may end up loving or hating parts of themselves in one another.

That morning, however, Vittoria is happy to see Giovanna. She lets the girl embrace and kiss her, tells her how much she loves her, and sets off with her for Margherita’s. On the way, she explains that Tonino had accompanied Giuliana on the rare occasions when Giuliana was allowed to see Roberto in Milan, but Tonino has now left for Venice. With Corrado considered untrustworthy, the family has turned to Giovanna. The reunion restores practical cooperation without resolving the underlying mistrust: affection returns, but so does Vittoria’s expectation that Giovanna will serve the family’s purposes.

The Body, the Bracelet, and Vittoria’s Influence

In Margherita’s bedroom, Vittoria again makes looking a physical demand. She brings Giovanna before a long mirror and criticizes the way she hides herself in her clothes. She lifts the girl’s skirt, comments on her figure, and makes her turn around; then she arranges Giovanna’s breasts above her neckline, presenting the body as something to recognize and display rather than conceal. The scene echoes her earlier command to look, but its intimacy is coercive: Vittoria touches and rearranges Giovanna while insisting that they are beautiful and should not waste what they were born with.

Her counsel combines encouragement with threat. Vittoria praises Giovanna’s appearance and intelligence, says she wants her to do even better than Giuliana, and contrasts her aspiration with the contempt she directs at Giovanna’s father. She also warns Giovanna to value her virginity and weigh the consequences before giving it away, threatening that she and the girl’s father would beat her if she wasted it. The language of bodily self-knowledge therefore comes bound to surveillance and control. After the admonition, Vittoria takes the bracelet from Giovanna’s purse and clasps it onto her wrist, asking her to see how well it looks. The bracelet, previously a reason for return and confrontation, becomes part of Vittoria’s attempt to shape the girl’s appearance and future.

Narrative Role

Vittoria’s influence begins in the city’s vertical geography: she carries Giovanna down from the familiar, comparatively elevated world of her parents and into the streets, homes, speech, and relatives they have kept at the edge of her experience. Her lesson in looking challenges inherited judgments about class and refinement, since the small, book-poor apartments her parents might dismiss also contain warmth and an unforced welcome. But the aunt is not a simple corrective to the parents. Her demands for loyalty, her threats, and her volatile alternation between tenderness and rejection show how insight can coexist with coercion.

The name Giannina crystallizes Vittoria’s double effect. Among the paternal relatives, it gives Giovanna room to feel like another, more relaxed person; during the phone calls, Vittoria’s insistence on speaking to Giannina becomes a pressure Giovanna resists because she no longer wants to inhabit that identity. Their bond thus makes family belonging both enabling and costly. Vittoria teaches Giovanna to see the relatives and the history her parents obscure, while forcing her to confront an unsettling possibility: the traits she loves or recoils from in her aunt are also entangled with the father and with herself.