Giuseppina dell’Albergo dei Poveri

In nineteenth-century Naples, poverty is a sin. And the Royal Almshouse is the place where one atones for it. A vast building, a stone colossus towering over the city: within its walls, the destitute, the elderly, fallen women and orphans are taken in out of charity. They work, they obey, they remain silent. And yet Giuseppina has chosen to enter it. She rebelled against the marriage forced upon her by her family – a fate already written in the darkness of a basement in the Vergini district – and followed the man she loves there. The price of that choice is the icy water of the washhouses: washing other people’s clothes, a daily existence governed by ruthless rules, which she survives only thanks to the steadfast solidarity of the other washerwomen. Then a sudden tragedy leaves her alone with her children. And Giuseppina will have to make another choice, an even more difficult one: to lower her gaze, to remain silent, so that she can continue to hope for a future far from the Albergo, a future made of light, of breath, of that sea she glimpsed just once as a child, and which has since become the measure of everything that has been denied her. It is Giuseppina herself who tells us her story, in a voice that blends Italian and dialect, anger and tenderness, irony and pain. A voice that gives body and soul to all the women whom the Albergo has swallowed up without a trace. And which reminds us how ancient is the silence imposed on those born without power, and how much courage it takes, even today, to break it.