Andrea and Vittoria’s prolonged estrangement

Andrea and Vittoria’s prolonged estrangement is a defining fracture in Giovanna’s paternal family: it turns relatives into distant strangers, makes Naples’s social geography feel like a boundary between worlds, and places Giovanna between her father’s refusal of his family and her aunt’s insistence that she look closely at what has been kept from her. The estrangement persists through years of silence and hostility, even as Giovanna’s attempts to understand it repeatedly bring her into contact with its consequences.

Family Separation and the Divided City

For much of Giovanna’s childhood, her father’s relatives are scarcely part of her life. Her mother’s family has a recognizable home in Museo, but her father’s family seems to live in an undefined place reached by a long descent into Naples. The distinction is more than a matter of directions: Giovanna associates her own familiar world with the Vomero, Villa Floridiana, gardens, and childhood friends, while the lower city beyond those landmarks is unfamiliar. Her parents, who travel down for work and study, still appear weary and tense when they have to visit Andrea’s family.

On the drive to see Vittoria, Andrea finally describes his origins to Giovanna. He grew up in the neighborhood they are crossing and says his family was poor; he points out the building where he lived and where Vittoria still lives. His account briefly opens a door into the past, but it does not reconcile him with the relatives he has left behind. The family’s distance is experienced in the car as both physical descent and inherited division.

Vittoria’s Introduction to the Paternal Family

Vittoria later takes Giovanna to meet Andrea’s siblings and other relatives, turning family contact into an exploration she calls meeting her blood. They travel in Vittoria’s green Fiat 500, visiting Aunt Anna in Cavone, Uncle Nicola in the Campi Flegrei, and Aunt Rosetta in Pozzuoli. Vittoria presents these visits as a corrective to Andrea’s separation from his family, and she urges Giovanna to compare the relatives with her parents rather than accept the family story at a distance.

The relatives are initially unfamiliar to Giovanna, who struggles to remember whether she has ever known their names. Yet they welcome her warmly. Their homes are small and plainly furnished; conversation moves between Neapolitan dialect and Italian, and Giovanna tries to answer in kind. They do not ask after Andrea or ask her to carry greetings to him, but they make clear that their hostility is not directed at her. They call her Giannina, a name her parents never used, and she finds herself more relaxed and affectionate among them than she expected. The visits show that Andrea’s estrangement has not erased the paternal family’s capacity to welcome his daughter.

Vittoria’s role in these encounters is double-edged. She is good-natured during the visits, and the relatives treat her tenderly, especially Uncle Nicola, who remembers her fondness for strawberry gelato and sends for some when he learns Giovanna likes it too. At the same time, Vittoria presses Giovanna to interpret the family contrast in her own terms, repeatedly insisting that she look carefully. The welcome gives Giovanna a real experience of belonging, while Vittoria’s prompting makes that belonging part of a larger dispute with Andrea and Giovanna’s parents.

Estrangement and the Crisis Between Families

The conflict between Andrea and Vittoria unfolds alongside the breakdown of Andrea’s marriage and the upheaval in the family around them. After a confrontation between Andrea and Mariano, Mariano disappears from Via San Giacomo dei Capri, and Giovanna sees Angela and Ida less often. The adults’ quarrel, which begins among familiar discussions of politics and other intellectual subjects, turns into a violent family rupture. The girls do not understand its full cause, but they sense that the conflict involves matters their parents have concealed from them.

Giovanna fears that Vittoria has told Andrea what she saw between her mother and Mariano, and that this disclosure helped provoke the quarrel. She connects the family crisis to a series of unexplained gestures, including Costanza’s visit and the return of a white-gold bracelet. Her suspicions remain uncertain, but they make clear how the estrangement spreads: a conflict between siblings becomes entangled with the parents’ relationships and with Giovanna’s position as a witness, confidante, and possible messenger.

It takes Andrea and Giovanna’s mother almost two years to decide to separate. During that period Andrea disappears for weeks at a time, later returning with affection and courtesy before the household falls back into arguments. One matter, however, unites the parents: they agree that Giovanna should not see Vittoria again. Giovanna does not resist the ban. She is exhausted by what Vittoria has confided in her and by the mixture of fascination, fear, resentment, and revenge that has accompanied their relationship. Vittoria, for her part, falls silent after the crisis, and Giovanna assumes she is waiting for her to make the next move.

Renewed Contact and Continuing Distance

Vittoria eventually begins calling again, asking for Giannina. Giovanna repeatedly refuses to answer or hangs up. The name carries the memory of the more open, playful self she felt among her aunt’s relatives, but she no longer wants to occupy that identity or resume her former place in Vittoria’s life. Even when she hears suffering in Vittoria’s voice and feels pity or curiosity, she keeps silent. The telephone becomes a small, repeated enactment of the estrangement: Vittoria calls, Giovanna withholds a response, and the relationship remains suspended rather than resolved.

Later, when Giovanna wants to visit Vittoria partly in the hope of seeing Roberto, the call reveals that her mother had previously told Vittoria to leave her alone and never see her again. Vittoria reacts with fury and accuses the family of taking away her reasons for living; she also treats the return of the bracelet as no simple settlement between them. Giovanna tries to call back and tell Vittoria that she is on her side, but receives no answer. Contact has resumed only to expose the old division again: Giovanna wants Vittoria’s affection and access to her world, yet she cannot make their competing loyalties disappear.

Andrea’s estrangement from Vittoria is still evident when Giovanna tells him she has decided not to see her aunt anymore but will continue seeing Margherita’s children. He asks who Margherita is. Giovanna initially thinks he is pretending, then recognizes that he has chosen not to know anything about Vittoria’s life. Though he and Vittoria have been estranged for decades, his ignorance is not a temporary lapse but part of the distance he maintains. The contrast is striking: Vittoria has brought Giovanna into the network of paternal kin, while Andrea’s refusal leaves even its relationships unfamiliar to him.

Significance

The estrangement is conveyed through divided spaces, interrupted visits, family names, and withheld information rather than through a single act of reconciliation or final break. The descent from the Vomero into the neighborhoods where Andrea grew up gives the family divide a physical form; the journeys with Vittoria then show Giovanna crossing that divide and finding a welcome that her father has not sought for himself. The visits do not repair Andrea and Vittoria’s relationship, but they let Giovanna experience the relatives as people rather than as a distant source of parental tension.

For Giovanna, the rupture creates a repeated conflict over whom to trust and what it means to belong. Vittoria’s insistence on looking makes her a guide to family history, but the pressure to take sides also burdens Giovanna with adult disputes. Her refusal to answer Vittoria’s calls, followed by her later attempt to reconnect, shows that separation is neither clean nor emotionally final. Andrea and Vittoria remain divided, and Giovanna’s contact with each is shaped by the other’s absence.