Giovanna’s virginity

Giovanna’s virginity is not merely a fact about her sexual experience but a measure through which she confronts desire, comparison, and the kind of adult she wants to become. In the presence of Giuliana and Roberto, she briefly experiences inexperience as humiliation; as she considers betraying Giuliana to pursue Roberto, that desire becomes entangled with fear of resembling Vittoria. By the time she leaves for Venice with Ida, she has recognized that she has no urgent need to lose her virginity and imagines adulthood as something she and Ida can define for themselves.

Inexperience as humiliation

During a night spent in the same house as Giuliana and Roberto, Giovanna tries to keep apart from the couple and from the possibility of imagining their intimacy. She reminds herself that she is Giuliana’s friend and does not want Roberto to touch her. Yet under the covers she is sweating, unable to breathe easily, and listening to ordinary noises in the house. The silence from the bedroom leaves her to speculate about what the couple may be doing, and she eventually cries before falling asleep.

In that unsettled moment, Giovanna names her virginity as a humiliation for the first time. Her knowledge of sex consists of books and other experiences, but she feels that this knowledge does not bridge the distance between herself and Giuliana. The episode makes inexperience an emotional condition rather than a simple biographical detail: Giovanna is troubled by the desire to imagine herself in Giuliana’s place, even as she insists that she is not Giuliana and is not in the bedroom with Roberto.

Desire and the fear of becoming Vittoria

On the train toward Milan, Giovanna revisits her intentions and recognizes that recovering the bracelet and helping Giuliana are not her real purposes. She understands that she is going to betray Giuliana and try to take the place Roberto has offered her. The prospect of losing her virginity with Roberto seems to her a way to enter adulthood, particularly because his praise has made her feel beautiful. But that new self-image immediately becomes morally unstable: she fears that using Giuliana’s trust to pursue him would make her resemble Vittoria, who had harmed Margherita, or her father, whom she associates with harm to her mother.

The comparison returns to her father’s earlier remark that she was beginning to acquire Vittoria’s face. For Giovanna, the likeness is not simply physical: it becomes a warning that beauty and the power to attract someone might be joined to the capacity to injure another person. She feels guilty and frightened, and recognizes that the route to adulthood she had imagined is not the one she wants. Her virginity is therefore bound up with a choice about conduct and identity, not only with whether she has sex.

A changed sense of urgency

Afterward, Giovanna realizes that she has no urgent need to lose her virginity. Rosario attracts her for reasons she does not fully understand, but she does not call him. Instead, she calls Ida to ask whether she is willing to travel to Venice. Ida agrees and tells her mother, Costanza, who is pleased to have her away for a while and gives her money. Giovanna’s decision to contact Ida rather than pursue Rosario marks a practical change: desire remains, but it no longer dictates an immediate sexual decision.

Giovanna then calls Tonino, who initially welcomes the plan but points out that his small room in Mestre cannot accommodate three people. She and Ida will go anyway, accepting that he may choose whether to meet them. The journey is thus arranged around their companionship and their own initiative, rather than around a plan to lose Giovanna’s virginity.

The departure for Venice

The next day, Giovanna leaves for Venice with Ida. On the train they promise each other that they will become adults in a way no one has before. The promise does not establish that Giovanna has resolved every conflict about sex or adulthood; it does show that she departs without treating her virginity as an emergency to be corrected. What had seemed to her a humiliating lack has become part of a larger, unfinished effort to choose how to grow up.