Cambridge Inset: Italian Neighborhood (Location Key)

In the early twentieth century most of the Italian immigrants in Boston lived in the densely populated North End, east of Cambridge and right up against the harbor. The neighborhood full of "new Italian families" that Faulkner creates is in the opposite direction, west of Harvard (129). Quentin is led into it by the mysteriously silent little girl he encounters in the bakery. Its "shabby streets" with broken sidewalks lead to houses like the one with a "pink garment hanging in the wind from an upper window" (131). Quentin cannot find the girl's home, nor can he imagine himself at home in this new urban, ethnic America.