“What you’re asking,” joined in Ferruccio, “is whether affluence is good for everyone. Of course it brings TV, car jams in the little streets, hippie clothes, plastics, and the like. But it also means travel; the sarta told me this year she’s going to France for her vacation. When could that have ever happened before? And it’s not just a question of money—before when they had money they bought themselves gold earrings and bracelets—it’s a question of a new mentality, of educating themselves to other expectations. They stock deodorants now in the tabacchi.”

“But they don’t have books,” said Tina, though no one seemed to hear.

“It’s cleaner in Staffa than in Rome and the people are not as rude—not yet, anyway,” the count answered. “But it will come: Vulgarity and spoiling the environment always seem to come with progress and money. But the worst are the americani, the ones who go off to the Americas and break their backs laboring with picks and shovels and living like dogs in terrible climates. Then they come back with their money, acting like little kings and making the others unhappy with things as they are. Even their countrymen and relatives here despise them—they say anyone could make money if they wanted to live badly like that. They think money is everything, and yet they are the same cafoni as when they left. They’ll never change.”

Tina recognized in the count’s words about the americani her own anger and shame at them. They came over, uneducated and arrogant, to get even with Italy by showing how much money they had, to demand ice in their drinks, and to complain about the food. It was all those wretched americani who had always created the ambivalence of who she was. What had she in common with such types? And yet she felt compassion, if not toward them, at least toward their immigrant parents who had literally been in the same boat as Umbertina. If somehow America as Purgatory hadn’t yet refined their dross and had become, instead, their false Paradise, on the other hand it had taught them who they were: American.

Now, surprisingly, she found herself saying, “Oh, yes, there can be change. New people are born from new situations, and it’s education that recasts them. My father says all life is a question of recasting.” The table was quiet and listening to her. It was as if the count’s words had sparked some private illumination in her own uncertainty. It was a good sensation.

Then Giorgio Fermo broke the silence by quipping, “Ex rivis novis maximum flumen. Isn’t it true that it takes new streams to build up the old? To keep things flowing? That’s the function of the americani, too.”