Donato Sarratore Character Analysis

Donato is Nino’s father, Lidia’s husband, and Melina’s lover. He’s a railroad worker who moonlights as a poet and journalist. Donato and his family leave the neighborhood when Lila and Lenù are still in elementary school after Donato’s rumored affair with Melina Cappuccio goes horribly wrong. Later, when Lenù is in high school spending a summer on the island of Ischia, she finds that the Sarratore family is also staying at the inn run by Nella Incardo. Lenù begins reframing the things she’s heard about Donato and starts seeing him as an intelligent and sweet family man—but when he initiates sexual contact with her one night, she flees the island and becomes repulsed by him entirely. When Donato shows up in the neighborhood the following year claiming that he’s been unable to stop thinking of Lenù, Lenù enlists the help of her boyfriend, Antonio—who is also Melina’s eldest son—to scare Donato off. Slimy, sleazy, and a relentless womanizer, Donato serves as an early example of the ways in which men, at least in Lila and Lenù’s world, often live up to the negative rumors that women spread about them.