Vomero

Vomero is the elevated neighborhood that initially gives Giovanna a familiar map of Naples and a sense of belonging, but it is never simply a refuge. Set above the city’s less familiar districts and contrasted with her father’s origins in the industrial outskirts, it makes family estrangement and social difference part of the landscape. As Giovanna moves between Vomero and other parts of Naples, the neighborhood shifts from the edge of her known world into a setting for friendship, intimacy, and self-scrutiny.

Setting and the divided city

Giovanna’s family lives in the highest part of Naples, and the city’s geography is first narrated as a pattern of descent. Her parents willingly go as far as Vomero; below it lie areas she knows chiefly by name, and then the districts where her father’s relatives live, which seem to her like a separate, nameless world. The effort of going down to visit them makes distance feel more than physical: her parents grow weary and anxious, while the child senses a boundary between her own life and her father’s family history.

The streets around her parents’ social world lead toward Villa Floridiana, a park associated with childhood air and sunshine and with earlier hours spent there with Angela and Ida. The contrast is pointed: familiar streets and the park carry plants, gardens, flowers, games, and good manners in Giovanna’s imagination, while the lower city is less known and less warmly colored. Her parents also travel below Vomero for work, shopping, study, and discussion, but those routes do not automatically become hers. A place can be part of the adults’ daily geography and still remain emotionally distant from their daughter.

Crossing the boundary

That separation becomes concrete when Giovanna’s father drives her toward the neighborhood where he grew up and where Vittoria still lives. Leaving the ring road, he chooses the old streets and grows increasingly somber as the car passes bleak apartment buildings, industrial warehouses, garbage-strewn patches of green, and puddles left by rain. He tells Giovanna that his family was poor, then points out the deteriorating brick building where he lived. His disclosure gives her a first direct view of the origins that had seemed abstractly far below her own home.

Vomero also becomes the starting point for Giovanna’s repeated visits to Vittoria. After their relationship takes hold, her mother sometimes drives her to her aunt’s home and waits in the car; at other times Vittoria comes to meet her near San Giacomo dei Capri. These arrangements preserve the parents’ hostility even as Giovanna’s own connection with Vittoria grows. The journeys do not reconcile the siblings, but they allow Giovanna to cross a family boundary on her own terms.

A neighborhood of return and retreat

In a more settled period, Giovanna begins high school at a school on Vomero. Her visits with Vittoria continue and become routine, while the neighborhood remains one of the settings in which she experiences adolescence and its reversals. After her father leaves home for the first time, she abandons her studies, turns away from habits he had imposed, and withdraws into novels, television, and music. She spends time on the steps behind the high school and in Floridiana, places that connect her present isolation with earlier, happier walks. Looking out toward the gardens of Villa Santarella or across the sea and the city from a bench, she returns imaginatively to a childhood whose companions and family ties now feel altered.

Her academic failure sharpens this retreat. Giovanna thinks of not being promoted as the one distinction she can claim, and imagines her father telling those who respect him that she is unlike him and her mother, ugly inside and out like Vittoria, and perhaps destined to live with her in the Macello neighborhood, in the Industrial Zone. The imagined move makes the spatial divide personal: she turns the distance between Vomero and her father’s origins into a possible verdict on who she is and where she belongs.

Friendship and changing perspective

Later, Vomero becomes a meeting ground for Giovanna and Giuliana. During Roberto’s long absences, the two walk around the neighborhood talking about him. Giuliana comes up from the Montesanto funicular as if Vomero were a foreign country where she is happily on vacation; together they walk from Piazza Vanvitelli to Piazza degli Artisti and back. Their route is not merely a passage through streets. It gives Giovanna the occasion to speak about books, films, and music, while Giuliana listens closely and encourages her to share the interests that school and her earlier friendships had rarely invited her to discuss.

The walks also expose an imbalance beneath their closeness. Giovanna admires Giuliana’s beauty and the attention she draws, yet finds that a knowing tone or an obscure word can drain Giuliana’s energy. Beside her, Giovanna may feel invisible, but in conversation she experiences a different kind of power: she can guide what Giuliana sees and how she understands it. Vomero thus becomes a place where both women’s dependence and their unequal confidence are played out through talk and observation.

The neighborhood’s significance

Vomero’s importance lies in how it organizes Giovanna’s perception rather than in any single landmark. Its height and familiarity distinguish it from the city below, while journeys outward reveal that this apparent security rests alongside unacknowledged family origins and social divisions. The neighborhood is at once the protected geography of early childhood, the home base from which Giovanna reaches toward Vittoria’s world, and the setting where she later retreats and forms new attachments.

The routes through Vomero also change who Giovanna can be. Childhood memories in Floridiana belong to a time when Angela and Ida were companions; later walks with Giuliana make her an eager interpreter of the culture she has absorbed through reading and the arts. In the novel’s spatial pattern, knowing a place is not the same as seeing it clearly. Giovanna’s movement across the city repeatedly unsettles the boundaries she inherited, while Vomero remains the elevated point from which those boundaries first appeared natural.