To say that Parthenope chooses would already be a lie. Her life exists on the fragile boundary where a choice divides from a different one, as if each action originated from the edge. Turning toward one path quietly erases countless others. What looks like a decision is only a slight inclination, something taking shape before she can claim it as hers. Not selected in any way. Nothing is perceived as imposed. Parthenope simply experiences the emergence of whatever form. And her breaking point makes this visible. She seems to oscillate in plain sight, almost defying the frame, shifting between the deep ache of what she just lost and the quiet bewilderment of the new branch opening before her. Standing there, holding all the possibilities at once, each one hovering, waiting for one to fall into place.

The rest stays suspended, untouched, moving in a faint orbit around her, waiting for whatever moment might finally draw them in. Some encounters flare up and vanish quickly, intense enough to leave a mark but too delicate to survive duration. Others never manifest at all, and yet they exist with the same force, as if two lives brushed against each other in a place without time. There is a kind of perfection in these unfinished movements. They stay intact simply because they never had the time to spoil.

Love unfolds the same way everything else does: as an event, not a story. There is no urge to possess, no demands, no need to secure anything. Whatever comes, she touches lightly and lets pass. The sorrow afterwards isn’t remorse, but the sensation following an opportunity which didn’t get a chance to form into a reality. Perhaps this is the explanation for why these fleeting, shattered loves feel more genuine compared to those that last. What completes itself turns ordinary. What remains unfinished keeps its light.

Around her, others suffer in recognizable ways. They lose, fail, hope, desire, and what hits them moves in a single direction, breaking clean through. The currents released by her movements reach them without filter, and they fracture under the weight of what comes from here. The same intensity passes through her as well, but it arrives as a mixed surge, joy and grief rising together, the camera catching that precise instant where both coexist. Those nearby do not have access to that double register; what touches them enters sharply, without the counterforce that steadies her. With each step she takes, she seems to let a hundred selves fall away, and the paths she never walks echo most fiercely in the lives of those who loved her with a depth she could not return.

And this is why she unsettles us. We watch her from the safety of our chosen lives, from the habits which protect us from dispersal. Many of us become Devoto Marotta: we select a career, a mate, a dwelling, plus a group of duties preventing us from disappearing. We accept structure because without it we would spill everywhere. Parthenope, instead, remains open. She lets the world happen to her, the unchosen accumulate inside, lets what arrives take root without demanding definition. Such openness brings her into contact with something most lives keep out of sight. Her presence brushes against a depth others learn to leave unspoken. The longing for what might have been, for all the selves that remained possible, does not vanish with adulthood; it is simply kept quiet because acknowledging it can trouble the people we love. The wish isn’t to flee or to forsake, it is an acknowledgment of the immensity that was there before one shape arose. Nostalgia often unsettles those who rely on our steadiness, yet it has little to do with longing for the past or with stepping outside the life we inhabit. It is the trace of a wider field in which every direction still exists, including the ones we lived, the ones we left behind and the ones that have never had the chance to take shape. What we call memory is only a small portion of that reach; the rest remains uncollapsed, a vibration that maturity teaches us to quiet so we can keep moving. We rarely acknowledge this undertone, because naming it would open questions no relationship can fully hold, and its silence has nothing to do with shame.

By the time Parthenope reaches Marotta again, the world has already narrowed into a different kind of coherence. Their last encounter unfolds quietly, but with a muted kind of gravity. In the privacy of his home, he finally brings her to the room from which those clear vocalizations had reached her during earlier visits. There she meets the child made of water and salt, a body that seems barely held together, soft and vulnerable, as if shaped by the same sea that once gave her form. Nothing in him resembles beauty as the world understands it, yet the devotion that surrounds him gives him a kind of radiance Parthenope has never known. When she calls him beautiful, she is naming the love that holds him, not the shape he carries. It is probably the first time she has witnessed a form of love untouched by demand. And when Devoto answers “Yes, it’s beautiful,” something in the room settles with a quiet weight. He cannot step outside the line that defines him, and Parthenope cannot enter it without bending her own. Their paths part with a simple “Goodbye, Parthenope,” a farewell that holds its own muted tension, the close of a moment that could become nothing else.

Capri and Naples move with a kind of inner alignment that appears older than the scenes themselves, their aquamarine water, heat-soaked stone and drifting rooms behaving less like places than like the visible trace of something already unfolding beneath them. Light, air and texture seem to rise from a hidden continuity rather than from geography, as if the world were disclosing an interior surface instead of presenting a landscape. Nothing appears self-contained; everything carries a quiet insistence, a softness that suggests the visible is only one moment in a longer movement.

The cliffs, the courtyards, the sea-lit corridors and the warm rooms where curtains shift almost imperceptibly all share the same fragile solidity, the same sense that the world is held together by something that does not fully coincide with what we see. Sound moves through this widening with the same quality: a melody half-remembered, a voice reaching across decades, music that seems to accompany the moment rather than arise from it. The atmosphere appears dreamlike because it carries the texture of something deeper than waking, as if the same substance were shaping both the hours we inhabit and the ones we can only sense, dissolving the boundaries we rely on.

And in the presence of such a world, a question rises almost before one can think it: Where does any of this happen? That instant has no answer; what takes shape seems to move within a contour sensed but never located, something familiar yet out of reach, as though life was advancing along lines already humming beneath our steps. Not destiny, not script, only the quiet intuition that nothing begins where we imagine it does, and that much of what we call chance may have been stirring long before we arrived; so much so that one almost hears, beneath the movement of things, a truth that becomes visible only when the world starts to withdraw. «È difficilissimo vedere, perché è l’ultima cosa che si impara… Quando comincia a mancare tutto il resto.»