That idea was so deeply ingrained that even employment was viewed through the lens of your ability to build relationships. My mother, for example, believed I needed to find someone who could pull strings for me. And this is where one of the most revealing contradictions in my story begins: she was the first to go to church, pray, and recite the Rosary, but she didn’t cultivate relationships in the back rooms of the church or among the people who actually had influence. She prayed, but she didn’t network.
Yet she expected me to find someone willing to help me. When you come from a family without important connections, the problem isn’t simply finding a job. It’s finding someone who can open a door for you. And if that door can’t be opened by your father, your mother, an uncle, or a grandfather, then you look elsewhere. In the logic I grew up with, even a romantic relationship could become a form of social mobility. What could matter was the family of the woman you might marry: her social position, her connections, the possibility that she had a father, grandfather, uncle, or an influential relative who could lend a hand. I even had a family example right in front of me: someone I knew had managed to get into the workforce because his father-in-law had used his connections to help him. The message was simple: if your own family has no one who can put in a good word for you, perhaps you need to marry into a family that does. It may sound bizarre today, but back then it seemed almost natural. Because a family’s wealth isn’t measured only in money. It is also measured in people: who you know, who can make a phone call for you, who can introduce you, who can say your name in the right room. What we would now call social capital.
I never wanted to turn my life into a strategy built around connections. I didn’t look for a partner because of the family she came from, nor did I see marriage as a possible way into a job. I carried another belief that was even stronger: I had to make it here. I wanted to find my place in Naples without leaving. In that sense, staying was also a challenge. I wanted to prove that you could build something without abandoning the place you came from and, above all, without leaving your family behind. Being an only child made that even more concrete. Leaving didn’t simply mean moving to another city. It meant being farther away from my mother, from the responsibility of being there, and from the belief that your life should remain tied to the family you were born into. Staying therefore became, all at once, an act of love, a responsibility, and a test of whether I could succeed.
But that belief came with a price. If you couldn’t find work, it became difficult to blame everything on the lack of opportunities around you. You had to ask yourself what you hadn’t done enough. If other people found a way forward while you remained on the outside, you could eventually start thinking that you were the problem. Not the place. Not the system. You. That is where restanza stops being merely a geographic choice and becomes a psychological one. You can stay out of love, responsibility, or loyalty, but you can also stay because you are afraid that leaving would mean admitting you couldn’t make it. For a long time, those things were impossible for me to separate. I stayed because I was an only child, because I wanted to be close to my family, because emigration had always been presented to me as surrender, and because I wanted to prove that I could build my life in Naples.
Today I can look at all of this with more distance. I no longer believe that everyone who leaves is a loser, and I don’t believe that everyone who stays is automatically a winner. You can leave because you have no choice, but you can also leave because you are brave. You can stay because you love someone, but you can also stay because you are afraid. The difference, perhaps, isn’t the distance you travel. It is the reason you choose one direction over another. And that leads me to the hardest question. Not “Why didn’t I leave?”, and not even “Why couldn’t I find someone to pull strings for me?” The question is: “How much of my life was actually chosen by me?” When you grow up in a family that treats staying rooted as a form of success, eventually you have to learn to distinguish loyalty from fear, love from duty, choice from the inability to choose. Maybe growing up means having the courage to question what you were taught, your entire life, to call success and failure.
I still don’t know whether my restanza was a victory. I only know that it was my life. And perhaps, after almost fifty years, I can finally stop asking myself whether I was good enough at staying. I can ask myself a different question, one that is simpler and perhaps much harder:
If I had been completely free to choose, without worrying about disappointing anyone, would I have stayed anyway?
