Giuliana’s anxiety

Giuliana’s anxiety is the mounting fear that she is unworthy of Roberto and may lose the love that has given her life a new direction. It is fed by family pressure, distance, and imagined rivals, but the novel gives it a concrete, unsettling expression on a train: Giuliana’s anxious talk becomes difficult to stop, and her distress turns into a physical alarm that Giovanna tries to soothe.

Background and Pressures

Giuliana’s vulnerability is shaped by the unequal worlds she and Giovanna inhabit. Giovanna grows up in the elevated part of Naples, while Giuliana asks her to consider the neighborhood where she was raised and the difficulties of her own background. The city’s geography makes their difference tangible: Giovanna’s familiar world lies above, while the poorer districts associated with Giuliana and Vittoria belong to the long descent into the lower city. Giuliana invokes that upbringing when Giovanna tries to reassure her, insisting that her problems cannot be understood simply by looking from Giovanna’s position.

Her anxiety is also intensified by pressure within her family. After Tonino leaves without explanation, Giuliana is left to face Vittoria’s bullying and her mother’s demands. Her mother, encouraged by Vittoria, wants her to tell Roberto either to marry her immediately and move to Naples or to end the engagement. Giuliana resists the ultimatum: Roberto is occupied with work important to his career, and she wants to leave Naples rather than be bound to it. Yet the two older women repeatedly suggest that his putting work before marriage proves that he does not love her enough. Their insinuations begin to unsettle her despite her anger at Vittoria.

Fear of Losing Roberto

Roberto’s absences give Giuliana’s fears an immediate focus. When he plans to travel to London for ten days with Michela and two other professors, Giuliana becomes more distressed than she had been over earlier, shorter trips. The central issue is not simply that Roberto will be abroad, but that he will be traveling with colleagues, including a woman Giuliana imagines may take her place. Giovanna defends Roberto as cultured and faithful, but this confidence does not resolve the difference between the two young women’s positions: Giovanna can regard his character as reassurance, while Giuliana experiences his distance as a threat to the life she has built around him.

Giuliana’s fear is especially stark after Tonino’s departure, when she tells Giovanna that Roberto has changed her life by taking her away from the place where she expected to remain. She now understands being beside him as the only place where she can be herself. She contrasts her dependence with what she sees as Roberto’s secure sense of identity: he, she says, has always known who he is, while she cannot imagine who she would be if he sent her away. His social ease reinforces that imbalance in her mind. She recalls how he can charm and pacify Rosario Sargente, and how even accomplished professors orient themselves around him. Against such a figure, she fears that a more intelligent or important woman—particularly Michela—could displace her.

Giovanna’s Role and the Train Journey

Giovanna’s closeness to Giuliana has more than one motive. She acknowledges that cultivating the friendship also lets her remain near Roberto, but she recognizes that Giuliana genuinely needs support after Tonino’s departure. On the train, after Roberto and Giuliana have said goodbye at the station, Giovanna sees them kiss and cling to one another. Roberto tells Giovanna that she is beautiful; the compliment stays with her, even as she tries to set aside its effect and comfort Giuliana by saying that it must be wonderful to be loved so deeply.

The two girls are physically close in the corridor, touching hips and taking one another’s arms, yet emotionally absorbed in different things. Giuliana speaks at length about her fear that Roberto will leave her; Giovanna listens, encourages her to continue, and offers reassurances that Roberto has met other women and still wants a life with Giuliana. But Giovanna also admits to herself that she is happy because Roberto’s compliment has felt like a private formula of renewal. Her care for Giuliana is real, though it coexists with an inward attention to the words that have stirred her own hopes.

Giuliana’s account is not merely a generalized plea for comfort. She lays out the terms of her dependence with painful clarity: if Roberto dies, he would grieve and continue to be himself, but if he leaves her, she believes her own life would become nothing. She says she would kill herself if Michela took her place. Giovanna judges Giuliana an adult in this moment and herself still a girl, because Giuliana does not hide from the situation but describes its frightening logic directly. Nonetheless, Giovanna’s practical comfort relies on affirming that Roberto has chosen Giuliana and that she should remain as she is.

Physical Crisis and Significance

The strain that has accumulated in Giuliana’s speech becomes visible when she twists a lock of hair around her fingers. On noticing that the hair is caught there, she asks what is happening; after pulling again, she holds another lock and turns pale. She asks Giovanna whether she is dying. Giovanna answers that losing some hair will not kill her, and finds a small exposed patch of scalp. The moment makes Giuliana’s fear bodily without resolving its underlying cause: Giovanna can reassure her about the immediate sign, but cannot remove the anguish tied to her family history, her sense of unworthiness, and the possibility of losing Roberto.

The episode crystallizes the difference between Giuliana’s and Giovanna’s ways of meeting distress. Giovanna tries to comfort, but also shields herself from her own feelings and takes pleasure in Roberto’s attention. Giuliana, by contrast, speaks relentlessly and recognizes how completely her sense of self has come to depend on him. Her anxiety is therefore both a response to specific pressures—the ultimatum over marriage, the London trip, and the imagined competition of Michela—and a deeper fear that separation would erase the self she has only recently found beside Roberto.