51 pages • 1-hour read
Diavola
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Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, sexual content, emotional abuse, gender discrimination, and pregnancy termination.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Your Flesh and Blood”
Anna Pace travels from America to Italy to join her family for vacation. She is 34, lives in New York City, and works as an artist at an advertising agency. To avoid traveling with her brother, she lies about her arrival date and gets to Florence a day before the rest of her family is scheduled to arrive. After spending a day alone, she travels to Villa Taccola near the small town of Monteperso. Anna will be joining her parents, her twin brother (Benny), her sister (Nicole), and Benny’s boyfriend (Christopher), as well as Nicole’s husband (Justin) and their two young daughters, Waverly and Mia. On the way to the rental, Anna notices that her driver seems skeptical about the choice to stay at Villa Taccola. Upon arriving, she also finds something sinister about the ancient and isolated villa, and she notices that there is a circle of dirt around the villa, inside which nothing seems to grow. Nicole and Anna begin sniping at one another as soon as the latter arrives.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Togetherness”
Anna greets Benny and Christopher; she has met Christopher before, prior to the vacation, but no one else in the family has. When Anna learns that the family will be preparing dinner at the villa and staying in for the evening, she feels a strange sense of dread and claustrophobia.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Invisible Key”
During dinner, Anna’s family members bring up her ex-boyfriend, Josh. Most of the family seems confused and disapproving of Anna’s decision to end the relationship. Meanwhile, Anna notices that Nicole and Justin bicker frequently. The family turns to discussing the room in the villa’s highest tower, which is kept locked and is thus unavailable for them to use, much to Christopher’s annoyance. Anna’s parents explain that the villa’s caretaker showed them the key to the tower but insisted that they not enter it. When Anna reenters the villa after dining outdoors, she continues to find the atmosphere sinister and oppressive. She briefly notices what looks like a wine stain on the floor, but it disappears before she can clean it up.
Chapter 4 Summary: “What Had Bothered Her”
Anna falls asleep reading in her bedroom and wakes up in the middle of the night. She can hear her nieces talking in the hallway. She settles down for the night, but as she falls asleep, she realizes that the children’s voices she heard were speaking in Italian, while her nieces only speak English.
Chapter 5 Summary: “There Is a Darkness in You”
Just before she awakens, Anna has a dream in which a handsome young man says something unintelligible in Italian. At breakfast, Nicole presents the detailed itinerary she has planned for the entire vacation. Anna, Benny, and Christopher decide to rebel and abruptly leave the villa before Nicole has time to object. They drive to a nearby winery, where Christopher grates on Anna with his arrogant and entitled behavior. When Anna and Benny have a moment alone together, she quickly provides some context for her break-up with Josh: Anna discovered that she was pregnant and terminated the pregnancy without consulting him. When she told Josh after the fact, he became extremely upset with her. Later, Christopher comments that Benny has told him that Anna has a history of causing chaos during family vacations. She is annoyed with both of them.
When they arrive back at the villa, Anna thinks she catches a glimpse of someone in the tower, only to realize with confusion that there isn’t even a window. Benny and Christopher leave the villa to meet up with the rest of the group, but Anna decides to remain at the villa alone. Sitting outside the house, she broods about the memory of a family vacation 12 years earlier. During the trip, she hooked up with a local bartender and didn’t return to the resort where the family was staying until the following day. Although Anna believed that Nicole knew her whereabouts, the family had gone into a panic when she was missing and caused a scene at the resort. Ever since then, the family expects her to behave inappropriately during vacations.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Pentimento”
When Anna enters the villa alone, she is overwhelmed by a feeling of dread and hears strange noises from the locked room in the tower. Trying to settle herself, Anna begins sketching but feels compelled to draw strange images of the villa, including one of a woman in the tower. When she glances at the pool, she is shocked to see two people floating as though drowned, but they vanish almost immediately. Unnerved, Anna sketches the scene.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Monster Role”
Anna finds herself relieved when her family returns to the villa. However, while Nicole is playing with her daughters in the pool, someone violently shoves her, and she hits her forehead. Nicole assumes that one of the children pushed her, but they deny it. Anna recalls how she dazedly drew an image of two bodies floating face down in the pool earlier that afternoon.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Italian Blood”
Nicole insists on going for the planned dinner, even though her mother suggests seeking medical attention for the gash on her forehead. At dinner, Christopher asks why Anna is the only one in the family who speaks Italian, and she explains that she used Duolingo in preparation for the trip. The family discusses how Anna is intellectually gifted and studied briefly at Harvard but never completed a degree. Their waiter flirts with Anna but seems horrified when he learns that the family is staying at Villa Taccola. He explains that his uncle is the caretaker there. Christopher suggests that someone ask about the locked room in the tower; he thinks that it is a special luxury room and offends Anna’s parents by implying that they aren’t paying enough money to be given access to it.
Anna slips away and privately asks the waiter about the locked tower room. He instructs her never to open it, asking if she personally accepted the key from his uncle. He responds to her query about ghosts by saying that there are “many” in the house.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Do Not Open It”
Later that night, Anna hears Benny and Christopher rummaging around in the storage room. She confronts them, suspecting that they are trying to find the key to the tower room. Christopher has the key and explains that the caretaker gave it to him when they arrived. Reluctantly, Anna joins them as they unlock the tower door and climb the stairs. The room at the top is completely bare, but Anna notes that “it [doesn’t] feel vacant. Locked up, yes, unfurnished, but not empty” (69). They descend and lock up the tower, feeling more relaxed. However, Anna is awakened hours later by the sound of a scream.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
The novel’s Italian setting evokes glamor and escapism; on the surface, a vacation in a luxurious villa in Tuscany seems desirable. English-language writers have used Italian settings to inspire narrative interest since the time of Shakespeare, who set comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew (1593) and Much Ado about Nothing (1598) in Italian locales; more modern works such as Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) and Eat Pray Love (2006) often position an Italian setting as a place where women can find love and self-actualization. However, Thorne subverts any expectations of a breezy Italian vacation by immediately establishing a dark and oppressive atmosphere shaped by tensions within the Pace family and the sinister mood of the villa. With the ancient and isolated villa in particular, Thorne alludes to another literary tradition: the early Gothic practice of setting frightening events in crumbling castles in Italy.
The use of Italian settings by 18th- and 19th-century Gothic authors reflected English stereotypes of Italy as a more “primitive” place—in particular, one where vulnerable women faced danger in the form of more rigidly patriarchal norms. However, Anna is not a traditional Gothic heroine: Her decision to travel separately from her family and lie about the date of her arrival immediately positions her as independent and iconoclastic. As her characterization develops, Anna emerges as a threat to the idealized nuclear American family unit. Anna is single and has intentionally refused motherhood by terminating a pregnancy. Especially in contrast to her mother and sister (both of whom are wives and mothers), she thus rejects many feminine social norms. She evokes discomfort in various characters, especially her family members, because she is intelligent, comfortable with her sexuality (including her desire for both men and women), and self-assured. Anna recounts how, upon learning that she had terminated her pregnancy, her ex-boyfriend exclaimed that “there is a darkness in [her]” (39). This underscores that Anna’s confidence, decisiveness, and independence render others uncomfortable by destabilizing their expectations and also isolate her from her family; these reactions quickly introduce the theme of Mistrust of Feminine Agency and Desire.
Anna’s lack of clear professional ambitions, despite her many competencies and talents, also makes it hard for her family to relate to her. Thorne depicts Christopher, in particular, as obsessed with the performance of status and social class; when he disputes Anna’s claim about her SAT score, “he straighten[s], triumphant, having won match point in some game of his own imagining” (59). The metaphor of a tennis match reflects Christopher’s competitive approach to life—he cannot rest until he has established his superiority—and ties his attitude to the norms of the white, upper-middle class most commonly associated with the sport. Anna is a skilled artist, picks up languages easily, and astutely reads social situations; however, she doesn’t apply these talents toward achieving wealth and high social status. Her decision to leave Harvard without completing a degree symbolizes Anna’s rejection of societal markers of success, serving as a counterweight in the novel’s exploration of The Empty Performance of Social Elitism.
Unlike Anna, the rest of the Pace family reflects stereotypes of arrogant American tourists: Anna is the only one who speaks Italian or seems to have any knowledge of the region’s history and local customs. For instance, when Benny, Christopher, and Anna visit a local winery, Christopher insists on using America as a frame of reference, commenting condescendingly on how “in Napa this place would be packed […] sad” (37). This self-certainty has dangerous consequences: They end up investigating the tower in part because Christopher is insistent that “it’s the master suite for the owner, the best room in the house” (61). Greed, arrogance, and snobbery thus catalyze the transgression that unlocks supernatural forces within the villa.
The symbolism of a forbidden room has literary antecedents, including Bluebeard’s Chamber and the hidden upstairs room in Jane Eyre (1847). Forbidden rooms of this kind often symbolize repressed emotions, desires, or memories; an individual can try to shut these away in their psyche, but they remain present as long as they are unresolved. The opening of the tower room is thus not merely a key inciting incident that drives the conflict—the violation of the rules surrounding the villa that unleashes the full force of Caterina’s ghost—but also a symbolic act. The opening of a space that is intended to stay sealed suggests the fissures within family relationships that open over the course of the vacation and, more broadly, a past that refuses to stay buried. The ubiquitous presence of these troubled family dynamics reflects the theme of Imprisonment in Denial and Repression.
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