51 pages • 1-hour read
Diavola
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, sexual content, death, child death, and substance use.
Cornicello
A cornicello is a traditional Italian amulet (sometimes worn as jewelry) intended to protect the wearer from evil omens. Its shape resembles a horn or sometimes a chili pepper (especially when fashioned out of a red stone). In Diavola, the cornicello is a symbol related to Mistrust of Feminine Agency and Desire; it represents Anna’s willingness to accept ancient wisdom, feminine intuition, and her inner knowledge.
Anna’s evolving relationship to the amulet illustrates this point. When Anna is visiting Florence, some elderly Italian women offer her one, but she refuses to take it. The women can sense that she needs the protection of the charm, but Anna is unsure of whether to trust her instincts about the ghostly presence in the villa; she is still focused on listening to others rather than to herself and thus rejects the token. Likewise, she keeps trying to maintain a relationship with her family because she thinks this is something she ought to do.
However, at the end of the novel, when she is living in Italy, Anna wears a cornicello “not because she’s afraid, but because she likes the way it taps the place between her breasts as she walks” (290). After successfully banishing Caterina’s ghost by following traditional rituals, Anna no longer disdains ancient or feminine wisdom. She has also learned the value of listening to her inner wisdom because it has guided her toward overcoming the ghost, cutting ties with her toxic family, and building a new life for herself as a successful artist. She thus proudly wears the amulet in homage to what she has learned about the world and herself. The amulet symbolizes Anna’s newfound confidence (including in her sexuality, as its location suggests), which is ultimately what protects her.
Tower
The Villa Taccola includes a mysterious and haunting tower. This tower is initially locked when the family arrives, and they are warned never to open or enter it. Nonetheless, Anna often believes she catches glimpses of someone looking out of a tower window, even though all of the windows have been bricked up for a long time.
The tower symbolizes the past, secrets, and suppressed truths, making it key to the theme of Imprisonment in Denial and Repression. Architecturally, the presence of a stone tower evokes the past by signaling the villa’s age; this type of design is typically associated with castles and other old structures. Since towers imply the presence of threats (they allow someone to see and scan the surrounding area), the presence of one also contributes to the villa’s threatening atmosphere. Moreover, towers have historical associations with prisons since they are difficult to access or escape from. Someone shut up in a tower is also removed from the rest of the building and can therefore be forgotten.
The relationship between the tower and Caterina’s ghost affirms these associations. Caterina is sealed into the tower during an exorcism ritual but is unleashed when Anna and her family open the tower; at the end of the novel, Anna seals her back up in the tower. As the site most strongly associated with the ghost, the tower represents a kind of subconscious—a place where individuals banish emotions and memories that they can’t or won’t confront. Symbolically, Anna’s family opens the tower because their time together surfaces unresolved tensions and trauma. While the tower symbolizes the desire to avoid uncomfortable realities, it therefore also symbolizes the impossibility of avoiding such truths entirely. Like repressed experiences, ghosts linger until individuals confront the past.
Alcohol
Anna and her family regularly consume alcohol, especially wine, making alcohol a major motif. Initially, alcohol evokes relaxation, leisure, and the pleasures of being on vacation in Tuscany, a region known for its vineyards. However, it gradually becomes clear that for the Paces, drinking is a means of escapism and can lead to destructive consequences.
Because the atmosphere during the vacation is often tense and characters are not actually enjoying themselves, they drink to make the experience tolerable. However, alcohol simply numbs them without resolving any of the problems that they are truly facing. In fact, the alcohol exacerbates the situation by lowering inhibitions and leading to hurtful actions: Christopher says cruel things to Anna after drinking, and Nicole brings up the stories of their prom after she has been drinking. Moreover, as supernatural events become more prominent, heavy alcohol consumption makes it harder for characters to discern what is real and what is not. Anna is very alarmed when an entire day seems to be missing from her memory, but this could be an alcohol-induced blackout rather than ghostly interference.
Ultimately, alcohol is associated with the violence of long-suppressed emotions coming to the fore. Anna and her family murder Christopher, a consistently irritating presence, during a bout of drunken revelry. Though the novel implies that Caterina had a hand in these events, the murder also speaks to the Paces’ inability to confront tensions head-on and the catastrophic consequences of allowing them to fester. Likewise, Caterina murders the villa owner and his family with poisoned wine, her own pent-up rage and jealousy overflowing. That alcohol is repeatedly confused with blood (as when Anna discovers Waverly and Mia drunk) further shows that it is a sinister and dangerous force within the novel.
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