The Charterhouse of Parma

“Beyond these hills, whose crests afford a glimpse of hermitages one longs to take refuge in, one after the next, the astonished gaze perceives the Alpine peaks, ever covered with snow, and their austerity reminds one of life’s miseries, and just how much of them are necessary to increase one’s present joys.” 

Gina has a romantic view of the countryside landscape in Grianta, which grants her the same distance from Milan that Fabrizio will find from Parma in the Farnese Tower. The experience of solitude grants a view of still more solitude in the distant hermitages which are, like any moment of reprieve in the novel, momentarily glimpsed. The privation of prison is prefigured by the austerity of the Alps which serve as a reminder—now close, now distant—to enjoy whatever one has.

“‘Speak more respectfully,’ said the Countess, smiling through her tears, ‘of the sex which will make your fortune; for you will always displease the men—you have too much spirit for prosaic souls.’” 

In the first significant exchange between Gina and Fabrizio on the eve of his departure for Waterloo, Gina makes a prescient remark about Fabrizio’s attachment to women—herself chief among them—as those who will guide and determine his fate. Men such as Mosca will indeed consider Fabrizio’s soul too enthusiastic, and here readers are given to see the cause of that view in Mosca’s own prosaic nature—that is, a lack of imagination that will be ambiguously valued throughout the novel.

“In this dispute, Fabrizio’s first impulse was quite that of the sixteenth century […] In this moment of passion, Fabrizio had forgotten all he had learned concerning the rules of honor and returned to instinct or to put it better to the memories of earliest childhood.” 

Fabrizio has taken to heart the 16th-century mores of which he reads in the family genealogy. The narrator explicitly labels his hero as one from another time, though he also links these past times with Fabrizio’s own childhood, as though he is instinctually and authentically shaped by a very distant past.