Positano and a meeting in it is enchanting

This is how Erica,  one of the two main characters in Goliarda Sapienza's novel Meeting in Positano, describes the town:

"Positano can cure you of anything. It opens your eyes to your past suffering and illuminates your present ones, often saving you from making further mistakes. It's strange, but sometimes I get the impression that this cove protected by the bastion of mountains at its back forces you to look at yourself square in the face, like a 'mirror of truth,' while this great sea, usually so calm and clear, similarly inspires self-reflection. That's why for decades now couples have arrived here thinking they're happy, only to break up after a few weeks—they'd been living a lie—or, on the other hand, why perpetually lonely people end up finding a companion here. . . ."

Positano is a town on the Amalfi coast south of Naples. It has existed since Roman times, was an important port during the Amalfi Republic (7th Century-1075), flourished during the middle ages, fell on hard times and was a relatively poor fishing village in the first half of the 20th Century, and began to attract a large number of tourists in the 1950s.

Meeting in Positano is set in the early 1950s and is narrated by a Goliarda who works in the movie business and who has come to Positano to scout locations. She meets Erica Beneventano, a lovely, wealthy widow who lives in a spectacular house and who is called "The Princess" by the positanesi. They become intimate friends, although not erotically intimate, and Erica shares her life story with Goliarda.

She was the middle of three sisters from a wealthy family. When her father loses everything in the 1930s, Erica and her sisters Olivia and Fiore have to go to work.  Erica finds a job in a Milan department store. "Since I was pleasant to look at and know how to pronounce the names of French perfumes, they put me in the cosmetics department." 

Her life unspools. She marries her father's ex-business associate Leopoldo who turns out to be a controlling Italian man. When Erica asks to take part in his affairs the way she had done before the marriage, "he said—not impolitely, but with a tone I had never heard before, decisive and cold like a steel blade: 'It's unseemly for a man to have his wife always in his hair.'" When Erica becomes pregnant, Leopoldo insists she have a Swiss abortion, which goes wrong enough she cannot have more children.

One more example of this family's dynamics. After Erica's father dies and the situation of the girls and their mother is grim, Erica thinks to turn to her uncle Alessandro, her father's brother who has been estranged from the family. A servant reports, "Alessandro was the only one of your relatives who wrote to me offering to help you all. I referred the message to your mother, but she just scolded me: 'Don't you see? That one has only popped up now to steal his brother's daughters. Don't you see that to him, it would represent the ultimate victory over his hated brother?'" 

Because the narrator and the author share the same name, are both in the movie business, and share the same interests, Meeting in Positano could almost be a memoir. The back of the book includes pictures of Positano, a useful afterward by Sapienza's husband, and a chronology of her life. She was born in Catania, Sicily, in 1924, moved to Rome in 1940 where she studied at the Regia Accademia d'Arte Drammatica. In the late 50s she worked with filmmaker Luichino Visconti (a relationship that the novel includes). She began writing in 1963. She finished Appuntamento a Postano in 1984, died in 1986, and the novel remained unpublished until 2015.

Brian Robert Moore's translation is smooth and natural. Here’s a description of a Positano baker/café owner: “I could never describe Giacomino’s voice—a sinuous wisp of smoke mixed with the whiteness of his jasmine flowers and the aroma of orange blossoms at sunset? A sound never heard before, incorporeal but precise. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the timbre that the angels must have had before the advent of the Christian era, in the time of Odysseus, and maybe even before . . . .

Goliarda Sapienza was enchanted by Positano and by whoever Erica Beneventano was in reality. A mark of Sapienza's craft is that she convinces that Erica is no more invented than is Positano. And because Sapienza was enchanted and because she writes so well, we are also captivated.