The sisterly friendship between Mattia Florio and Giuseppina Saffiotti

Mattia Barbaro and Giuseppina Saffiotti are sisters by marriage but become sisters by choice: trusted companions whose shared hardships make their attachment a refuge from the marriages and family decisions imposed on them. Their relationship runs from Giuseppina’s departure from Bagnara through years of separation to Mattia’s return to Palermo, where their care for each other persists amid illness, resentment, and obligations to the Florio family.

Kinship Beyond Blood

Giuseppina remembers Mattia as more than a sister-in-law: she is her friend, her rock, and the person who guided her through the difficult first months of her marriage to Paolo Florio. The strength of that bond is especially clear when Giuseppina leaves Bagnara for Palermo. Mattia meets her beneath King Roger’s Tower and tries to console her, promising that they will exchange letters. Giuseppina resists the separation, but Mattia holds her and urges her to be strong, explaining that women have little power under the arrangements governing their marriages.

The farewell also exposes the circumstances each woman must endure. Giuseppina has been brought away from her home by her husband, while Mattia remains in Bagnara with Paolo Barbaro, who says he needs her to care for his house and children. Giuseppina suspects he also wants to keep Mattia away from her brothers, particularly from Ignazio Florio, with whom Mattia shares a close bond. Their affection is therefore sustained across a distance created not simply by geography but by household authority and their husbands’ decisions.

Mattia asks Ignazio to be more patient with Paolo and to speak to him as a brother and a man, since Paolo will not listen to her. She also embraces Giuseppina and Ignazio together, making her request part of a wider appeal for care within the family. Giuseppina understands that Mattia’s marriage, like her own, was arranged by their families for money. She recognizes that Mattia is treated harshly by her husband, and sees their common ground in their shared heartbreak. The intimacy between the women is a form of recognition: each can perceive in the other what their husbands do not.

Separation, Return, and Mutual Care

The separation lasts for years. When Paolo Florio’s health deteriorates, Mattia arrives in Palermo from Marsala with her son Raffaele; Ignazio has paid for the journey. Mattia has confronted her husband, who did not want her to go, and has broken from her accustomed submission in order to reach Giuseppina. Returning to Bagnara is not a practical option: Paolo is too proud to reveal how far the Florio family has fallen and cannot bear the local talk about the Florios’ success. Mattia’s return is thus both a personal act of loyalty and a costly decision made in the face of family resistance.

The reunion takes place while Giuseppina is anxious about Paolo and about the effect of his illness on their son, Vincenzo Florio. Mattia listens as Giuseppina blames their departure from Bagnara for the family’s misfortunes and tries to steady her. She reminds her that no one can know what might have happened if they had stayed, and draws on her own history of leaving her family when her husband became ill. Her counsel does not erase Giuseppina’s grief; instead, it answers regret with the fact of their present reunion. They are together again, even after years in which each had been separated from people she loved.

Giuseppina, in turn, comforts Mattia when Ignazio sends her away. Mattia says that she can bear many sins but not this resentment from her brother: she has quarrelled with her husband to come, only to feel rejected by her own family. Giuseppina leads her to the bedroom and urges her to calm herself. The scene makes their sisterhood practical as well as emotional: when one is hurt and overwhelmed, the other provides shelter. Ignazio recognizes that they are sisters even though they do not share blood.

Family Duty and Its Costs

Their connection exists within a family system that offers support but also imposes burdens unevenly. The language of blood becomes a reason for loyalty: Mattia returns because she is a Florio, and, as the narrative puts it, the Florios do not forsake their own blood. Yet the women’s bond exceeds that principle. Giuseppina is not Mattia’s blood relative, but she is the person who receives her in distress; Mattia is not merely a relative by marriage, but Giuseppina’s closest confidante.

This contrast becomes sharper when Giuseppina recalls that she had been fourteen when Paolo’s father married Mattia off. She objects to Paolo’s claim that Mattia chose her husband, insisting that women had no real choice in marriage and invoking her own experience of being brought away from Bagnara. Her defense of Mattia is also a defense of their shared history: the family’s arrangements may describe a marriage as a choice, but the women remember the lack of power behind it.

The bond also carries obligations that can produce painful conflict. Mattia sacrifices comfort and faces opposition from her husband to reunite with Giuseppina, while Giuseppina’s loyalty to Mattia survives her anger at the circumstances that have separated them. Their relationship does not make those constraints disappear. It gives them a space in which their costs can be acknowledged rather than dismissed as ordinary marital duty.

A Continuing Source of Recognition

Mattia’s counsel repeatedly places Giuseppina’s losses beside the connections she still has. When Giuseppina says that she has no one because her relatives are dead, Mattia points to her son and to Ignazio. The exchange shows the tenderness and limits of Mattia’s support: she offers Giuseppina a way to see the people who remain, without pretending that grief for the dead or anger over her life can simply be set aside.

The sisterhood’s significance extends beyond their reunion. Years later, Giuseppina’s thoughts turn to the future of Casa Florio and the need for Vincenzo to marry and provide an heir. She sees inheritance and good blood as necessary to protect what Ignazio and Vincenzo have built. That concern recalls the same family structures that shaped both women’s marriages, now expressed as a mother’s anxiety about the next generation. Against this emphasis on lineage, Mattia and Giuseppina’s relationship offers another kind of inheritance: a lasting practice of listening, counsel, and mutual care that does not depend on shared blood or a marriage contract.