Signora Frola
The elderly mother-in-law of Ponza who becomes a source of gossip by virtue of her decision to live alone in a nice apartment instead of with her daughter and her husband who live in a tenement. Also making her the talk of the town is the strange circumstance in which her son-in-law often comes to visit her, but forbids her from coming to see her own daughter.
Ponza
Ponza enjoys a civil service position, but is also the source of gossip. Nobody ever seems to see his wife at their fifth floor tenement apartment and his custom of visiting her mother without her only contributes to the strangeness of the situation. Finally force to confront his neighbors, his explanation is that Signora Frola is actually so overcome with grief at the death of her daughter that she refuses to accept that she is no longer alive.
Signora Ponza
Wearing a veil over her face, she also confronts the neighbors with yet more strange information. She insists she is Signora Frola’s daughter as well as Ponza’s second wife. She does not appear until the very end and leaves the issue only further muddled with her cryptic statement while she is one thing for her mother and another for husband, for herself she remains nothing.
The Prefect
The Prefect is Ponza’s supervisor as well as the highest ranking official in the city. He is the figure that is called upon to mediate issues of contention among residents such as the mystery that has led to the gossip surrounding Signora Rola and her son-in-law. Only the Prefect’s ultimatum that he will have to dismiss him forces Ponza’s hand.
Commendatore Agazzi
Agazzi is the provincial DA, as it were, who seeks to protect that respect and authority by being the one who reports the gossip at the center of the story to the Prefect.
Amalia Agazzi
The Commendatore’s gossipy wife without whom he would probably never have considered the situation important enough to bother with the Prefect. In fairness, part of her interest in following the gossip stems from genuine concern, but just as large a part stems from being a buttinski. And, of course, just a little bit is related to the part her husband can play in solving the mystery.
Centuri
Every investigation must have an investigator and that role falls to the Commissioner of Police. He is the very epitome of law enforcement: concerned only with the facts as the key to solving a case without regard to the reality that the facts as he presents them are essentially useless in solving the deeper mystery.
Lamberto Laudisi
Brother-in-law of Commendatore Agazzi, he plays a dual role. On the one hand, he is the Devil’s Advocate to the Centuri’s plodding approach to rely on facts. On the other hand, he acts as a sort of philosophical figure who suggests that solving the mystery is beside the point anyway since it is nobody’s business but the Signora and her family.
