Vittoria Trada

Vittoria Trada, Giovanna’s paternal aunt and the woman her father has taught her to fear, is at once a family outcast and a powerful presence in Giovanna’s coming of age. Her blunt speech, passionate recollection of Enzo, and insistence that Giovanna learn to look for herself disrupt the polished distinctions her parents draw between refinement and vulgarity, truth and lies, and family loyalty and betrayal.

Identity and Family Background

Vittoria is the sister of Giovanna’s father, Andrea. In the family’s account, her name carries the weight of ugliness and spite: Andrea says that adolescence cannot explain Giovanna’s changing appearance because she is beginning to look like Vittoria. Giovanna overhears this at twelve, when she is physically self-conscious and believes her father adores every part of her. The comparison therefore wounds her not simply as an insult about beauty but as a threat to the secure affection she thought she possessed.

The hostility surrounding Vittoria is older than Giovanna’s understanding of its causes. Before visits to her, the adults dress with unusual care, and Andrea is tense and taciturn; Giovanna recognizes their anxiety as a recurring disturbance in what she remembers as a happy childhood. Her parents warn her to pretend not to hear if Vittoria says something, treating the aunt’s speech as something to manage or contain. For Giovanna, whose knowledge of Vittoria is initially slight, these preparations help make her seem nearly monstrous before she can judge her herself.

Giovanna’s First Encounters with Vittoria

When Giovanna eventually visits Vittoria, she finds her in a deteriorating apartment building in Naples. She climbs broken, uneven stairs to a door marked with the surname Trada. Vittoria appears tall and broad-shouldered, with very black hair, a cigarette in hand, and a cough. She greets Giovanna in a rough mixture of Italian and dialect, immediately speaking in a register unlike the carefully controlled language of Giovanna’s home.

Vittoria confronts the gap between Giovanna’s appearance and her understanding of the world. Seeing her dressed in pink, she calls her ridiculous and suggests that she believes lies more readily than truth. She also challenges Giovanna’s idea of herself as someone who knows how to dance, pressing past the outward signs of a well-protected, well-presented girl to ask what she actually knows and does. Her manner is abrasive, but it gives Giovanna access to questions and forms of speech that her parents’ household keeps at a distance.

The Body, Desire, and Enzo

Vittoria’s account of her past with Enzo makes her most startling impression on Giovanna. At Enzo’s grave, she describes their sexual relationship in explicit physical detail, saying they made love eleven times before he returned to his wife and that she never did it again with anyone. She presents the experience not as a deprivation but as something she fully possessed, insisting that passion and love had given her everything and that it was Andrea who had nothing. She also instructs Giovanna to repeat her words to her father, turning the intimate recollection into a direct challenge to his understanding of what he had done to her.

Giovanna is thirteen and is both overwhelmed and fascinated by this speech. No one in her own home has addressed her with such unconcealed attention to bodily pleasure. Vittoria’s candor breaks the conventions governing what a girl may hear, and the scene remains physically powerful in Giovanna’s memory. Rather than merely supplying scandal about the past, Vittoria’s story offers Giovanna a radically different language for desire, loss, and female experience.

Blood Relatives and the Practice of Looking

Vittoria also takes Giovanna to meet Andrea’s siblings and their families, calling the excursion a chance to meet her blood. They travel in Vittoria’s green Fiat 500 to relatives’ homes in Cavone, the Campi Flegrei, and Pozzuoli. Giovanna has scarcely known these relations, but they welcome her warmly. Their apartments are small and plainly furnished, and their Italian is mixed with dialect; Giovanna, raised to regard such surroundings and speech as crude or vulgar, nevertheless finds herself making room in her own careful Italian for Neapolitan cadences.

The relatives do not ask Giovanna to carry greetings to Andrea, a sign of the rupture between them, but they make clear that they do not hold her responsible for it. They call her Giannina, the name Vittoria uses and her parents do not. Among them Giovanna feels unusually relaxed, affectionate, and funny; she imagines that the name has brought forth another version of herself. The warmth of these visits complicates her inherited picture of Vittoria’s side of the family as merely uncultivated or hostile.

During the visits, Vittoria urges Giovanna to compare the relatives with her parents and to notice what her upbringing has taught her to dismiss. She accuses her of looking without seeing and repeats her demand to look carefully. This instruction is inseparable from the experience itself: Giovanna encounters both the family estrangement, visible in the relatives’ silence about Andrea, and their affection for her and tenderness toward Vittoria. An uncle remembers Vittoria’s fondness for strawberry gelato and sends a child to buy some when he learns Giovanna likes it too. The gestures make kinship tangible in a way that the parents’ warnings had obscured.

Character and Narrative Significance

Vittoria’s presence unsettles the social boundary between refinement and vulgarity. Giovanna’s family associates her with ugliness and malice, while setting cultivated, wealthy Costanza against Vittoria as poor and uneducated. Yet Giovanna’s experience does not let those labels settle into a reliable moral ranking: the relatives’ plain homes offer unexpected welcome, and Vittoria’s roughness coexists with forceful attention to family feeling and to the truth as she sees it.

Vittoria’s language is part of that challenge. The dialect that is forbidden in Giovanna’s household appears in Vittoria’s speech and among the relatives, where Giovanna begins to adopt its cadences. Her bluntness also refuses the protective silences imposed by the adults, whether she is speaking about sex, Andrea, or the family ties Giovanna has not been allowed to know. Through her, Giovanna’s resemblance to the aunt becomes more than a source of shame: it opens a fraught connection to a different account of beauty, belonging, and what it means to see clearly.