Journal of Aging Studies 25 (2011) 225232

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Journal of Aging Studies

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / j a g i n g

Home sweet home: The emotional construction of places

Antonio Cristoforetti a, Francesca Gennai a,, Giulia Rodeschini b
a
b

Trento Regional Institute of Social Study and Research, Via S. Margherita 28, 38100, Trento, Italy
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Via Verdi 26, 38100, Trento, Italy

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 14 March 2011
Accepted 14 March 2011
Keywords:
Place
Sensemaking
Widowhood
Situatedness
Emotional
Attachment

a b s t r a c t
The social sciences have recently shown a revival of interest in space and place. In this spatial
turn the place is seen as a place-in-process (Thrift, 2008) and as the emergent result of
constant re-involvement processes based on the continuous re-definition and re-construction
of its meaning. Moreover, elderly people's homes have acquired a renewed importance in the
wake of an aging in place strategy in social and health policies. This study describes the
processes of situatedness of place that occur during the widowhood. Involving ten older
widows, our analysis identies four distinct processes in the construction of the situated
meaning of a place: Heart displacement, The showcase of the self, Refuge and Introjection of
external spaces.
2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction1
In literature, the space is dened as an objectively
identiable context, while the place is described as a result
of subjective re-involvement processes characterized by
instability, mobility and continuous creativity. Researchers
have therefore begun to talk of the place-in-process, dened
in terms of its characteristics of dynamism and volatility,
which is less concerned with stability and more concerned
with movement, interactivity, and continuous birth (Thrift,
2008, p. 95). Shifting the attention from an idea of space as an
objective and emotional container to an idea of place-inprocess, we investigate the processes of social construction
activated by elderly women during the widowhood, a
signicant turning point that leads to the restructuring of
places within the home. Focusing our attention on the
processes by which the meaning of home is constructed

Corresponding author. Tel.: + 39 328 7045879.

E-mail address: francesca.gennai@irsrs.tn.it (F. Gennai).
1
The user study presented in this paper draws on a longitudinal study
begun in February 2006 as part of the European Project Netcarity. The goal
of the Netcarity project is to design and develop AAL technologies through a
process of user-centered design. Antonio Cristoforetti wrote Section 3 of the
paper, Francesca Gennai Sections 4 and 5, Giulia Rodeschini Sections 1 and 2.
0890-4065/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2011.03.006

amid the continuous re-denition and re-construction of

domestic space, our analysis identies four distinct processes
in the construction of the situated meaning of a place: Heart
displacement, The showcase of the self, Refuge as an
inviolable space and Introjections of external spaces.

Background: the situatedness of place

Gerontological studies have predominantly taken space
for granted and have rarely treated it as a process that leads
to the social construction of a place. In parallel with the
development of aging in place strategies in social and health
policies (Dyck, Kontos, Angus, & Mckeever, 2005), the
relationship between space and place has been examined in
its meanings of house (objective space), home (emotional
space) and dwelling (comfortable space). In regard to these
studies, two dimensions seem to be particularly signicant
for the purposes of our analysis: the attachment to place
(Rubinstein, 1989; Rubinstein & Parmelee, 1992; Wiles,
2005) and the meaning of home (Becker, 2003; Rubistein,
1990; Twigg, 2006).
Attachment to place is a set of feelings about a geographic
location that emotionally bind a person to that place as a
function of its role as a setting experience. This kind of

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attachment is especially important for older people because,

rstly,
attachment to key former places is one way of keeping
the past alive and thus relates to the later-life tasks of
maintaining a sense of continuity, fostering identity, and
protecting the self against deleterious changes. Second
[ly], attachment to a current place may be a way of
strengthening the self () may act as a buffer, a means of
retaining a positive self-image. Third[ly], attachment to a
current place may be a way of enacting or representing
independence and continued competence (Rubinstein &
Parmelee, 1992, p. 139140).
Shenk, Kuwahara, and Zablotsky (2004), studying older
women's attachment to their home, emphasize the importance
of time, routines and rituals in the development of place
attachment. The home seems primarily to represent a comfortable place, a concept that combines both physical and
emotional comfort derived from familiarity, personal rituals
and routines, and other characteristics. Attachment to place is
therefore connected with the personal and social meanings that
are given to the home, and it is directly proportional to the level
of importance that these meanings have in a person's life.
The concepts of privacy, safety/security, and identity are
generally recognized as central in the construction of the
meaning of home. The home represents the quintessence of
private space (Twigg, 2006, p. 124) based on the idea of
privacy dictated by the modern differentiation of the public
sphere from the private one, and therefore on its capacity to
exclude strangers and non-residents (p. 125). The home has
always represented and symbolized the passage from the
external world to the internal world, from the public sphere
to the private one. It is a place of safety in which to reect, to
take shelter; a place to be left in search of sustenance, or in
case of need, and then returned to. Therefore the home
acquires the meaning of a place of relaxation and freedom, of
detachment from the community, from the Other. It gives a
sense of security and protection, especially to elderly people,
who tend to feel vulnerable in public spaces. By contrast, the
feminist view on the home stresses that its meanings cannot
be assumed wholesale, because they inevitably intersect with
particular experiences and social relationships. The home,
therefore, as a strongly gendered space, may also be a place of
fear and abuse, or a place of loneliness and isolation.
Finally, it is widely acknowledged that the space of the
home experienced in terms of places and relationships,
objects and emotions includes and completes a person's
self-image and sense of identity, understood as expression,
identication, belonging, power, and appropriation (Rowles &
Chaudhury, 2005). As clearly emerges from Rubinstein (1989,
1990) and from more recent studies (Becker, 2003; Shenk
et al., 2004; Twigg, 2006), the home may be lived as an extension of oneself, of one's desires, feelings, hopes, and actions.
The everyday use of domestic spaces (Percival, 2002), the
temporal organization and development of routines and
rituals (Zerubavel, 1981), the choice of the objects and
materials with which to surround oneself, represent some
processes which serve as bridges among life-phases. In the
case of elderly people they perform the particularly signicant function of summing up their lives, linking them to the

person they once were, as well as embodying memories of a

lost partner (Twigg, 2006, p. 125). Habitation can thus
constitute an extension of the self and personal identity, but
they are also bodily places of relationships and physical
connections with space (Imrie, 2004).
The interest of our study focuses on the process of
construction of place. As people constantly attribute personal
meanings to their homes, they become meaning makers, so
that the domestic space is transformed from a simple container
to a home-place, subjectively lived and imbued with meanings.
A step further leads us to denition of places as situated
processes. On the one hand, in fact, we speak of places in
process because places are intrinsically tied to the continuous
re-denition and re-construction of space and its meaning, and
to the transformation of the relations between people and their
lived spaces. On the other hand, we speak of the situatedness
of place because, as seen from the literature, a place is situated
in the relations among people and between them and spaces,
in that it is contingent and anchored in space and time.
The gerontological literature already implicitly considers
the concept of situated place when it deals with a particular
situation or life-phase. In our study this situation is
widowhood, a turning point that leads to a radical change
in the experience of places, and especially of the home
created with the partner. It may involve a change of home or a
subjective change in the physical and emotional relationship
with it. Our research concentrates on this latter aspect and
dealt with widows who had decided to remain in the same
house that they shared with their husbands. In light of these
considerations, in order to explore the process of emotional
constructing places within the house, we decided to adopt the
sensemaking perspective proposed by Leith (2006, p. 318):
as people's circumstances change, the ways in which they
experience and conceptualize the home change as well.
Given these remarks, it becomes relevance to investigate the
place construction processes that occur during the phase of
widowhood, when the change brought about by the partner's
death means that the widows nd that their existing
interpreting schemes or frames of reference no longer sufce
to make sense of the new situation. This situation induces the
widows to activate complex processes to make new sense
of actions, events and objects, or explain the relationships
between them through which they could reconstruct the
emotional map of their home. Sensemaking is seen here as a
conceptual framework with which the emotional construction of places can be understood as a situated process which
occurs during widowhood.
Methods
The aim of this paper is to understand the processes
enacted by widows to socially construct places within the
home. The research question addressed was this: how does
the situated meaning of a place emerge? In order to
investigate these processes, we decided to use a qualitative
research methodology.
The ten participants involved were selected from among
widows attending two of the main gathering places for the
elderly (Universit della Terza Et e del Tempo Disponibile
University of the Third Age and Centro Servizi Anziani
Center of Older People) in Trento, a city in northern Italy.

A. Cristoforetti et al. / Journal of Aging Studies 25 (2011) 225232

These two centers for senior citizens and their social workers
were important in mediating the relationships between
researchers and the elderly involved. Within each center we
identied a case-manager who assumed the responsibility for
overseeing the ethical dimension of research. The case
manager has supported the researchers: in the statement of
research objectives, ensuring their understanding and sharing on a basis of transparency criteria; in the denition of
research methodologies appropriate to the characteristics of
the identied target; in the creation of the pact trust with the
elderly, which ranks as the warrantor of that agreement; in
the management of negative emotions experienced by some
participants in remembering the past.
The 10 informants ranged in age from 72 to 92 years.
We decided to involve widows in Italy they are ve times
more numerous than widowers (12.6% versus 2.4%) (ISTAT,
2009) who had decided to remain in the home that they had
shared with their partners, and who had lived alone for more
than ten years, so that widowhood was a recent phenomenon
and the processes of place signication had coalesced over time.
Four of the informants had worked only as housewives, while
six had had jobs outside the home. Five of them lived in
apartments of small size (around 50 m2), four in apartments of
70/80 m2, and only one in a detached house with a large garden.
The data were collected using the Cultural Probes methodology (Gaver, Dunne, & Pacenti, 2003), which lets the
participants narrate their own lives. We chose this relatively
non-invasive technique because it proves fruitful when the
researcher is initially unable to enter the domestic space subject
to study. The Cultural Probes method furnishes fragmentary
glimpses into the rich texture of people's lives (Gaver, Boucher,
Pennington, & Walker, 2004) and makes it possible to discover
and explain the way in which people themselves understand,
explicate, and manage daily situations. Cultural Probes consist
in a special kit of creative and provocative materials (Beyer &
Holtzblatt, 1998; Hemmings, Crabtree, Rodden, Clarke, &
Rounceeld, 2002) that let the participants narrate their lives.
As some researchers (Gaver et al., 2004) have noted, the probes
are often fragmentary and ambiguous. However, they can be a
resource with which to investigate the subjective accounts that
people give about material that they have produced, and they
should be considered also a resource for the cooperative
analysis of data. Our kit was designed in function of our
research question, and it consisted in the following selfexpression tools:
Pen and paper, with which to draw maps of the homes, and
adhesive labels to describe the emotional and functional
nature of the various places in the home. We included labels
referring to daily activities e.g., the place where I meet
friends feelings e.g., the place where I feel safe and
metaphors e.g., the heart of home. Participants were
also asked to draw relevant objects, artifacts and technologies on the map. We expected this information to
contribute to our understanding of how older adults
organize and give meaning to the domestic space, and of
the relationship between objects and activities.
A camera, with which to take pictures of the home and its
spaces, to be used as additional descriptions of the home
and the objects it contains, enabling comparisons with the
information provided by the maps.

227

A photo album in which to collect and organize the pictures.

Participants were asked to comment on the emotional
aspects evoked by the places portrayed. Suggestions on
what to write were given by using prompts such as my
favorite place, the most dangerous place, where I feel
comfortable, and so on. The album was used as a repository
of evocative material to be interpreted together with
participants during individual follow-up interviews.
A diary, in which to narrate, day-by-day and for a whole
week, the activities performed at home and the temporal
organization of daily life.
A notebook, in which to describe in more detail how daily
routines i.e., the activities that are performed each day on
a regular basis take place (e.g., waking up, preparing food,
getting ready to go out, rituals at the end of the day).
A small suitcase, to encourage participants to collect
domestic objects that expressed their personal meaning of
home. It was meant to explore the metaphorical and
emotional dimension of housing.
The tasks set by the cultural probes were assigned to the
participants at four weekly workshops organized at their
centers, which were therefore settings relatively familiar to
them. During the workshops, the informants presented the
material produced during the previous week and discussed
them both with each other and with the researchers. Thanks
to this sharing of personal narratives in a group characterized
by familiarity, the researchers gained the trust of the
participants, who spontaneously expressed their willingness
for the follow-up interviews to be conducted in their homes.
These follow-up interviews were useful because the participants could complete fragmentary or missing information,
and expand on important topics. Therefore the researchers
had the opportunity to discuss material produced with the
informants so that it was checked in order to avoid
interpretation biases (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).
The material produced by the participants was heterogeneous in both its amount and the tools used. The follow-up
interviews were particularly useful for collating the various
expressive modes adopted into a single meaning system. To
facilitate analysis of the data, we transcribed our observations
and eld notes (all the widows' interviews) and their
comments associated to each picture and map. Therefore the
data took a homogeneous textual form. Taking the Grounded
Theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as reference, we
identied a list of recurrent labels used by the participants
(named rst level labels). Then we constructed a set of
categories about the relation between home and people
metaphors, emotions, symbolic objects and home routines
and through an abstraction process we identied the second
level labels. The different labels identied by the researchers
were compared and cross-veried during workshops. Comparing the rst level with second level labels, the four
processes of place construction are emerged and are described
in the next section.
The emotional construction of a situated place
In the aging process and in widowhood, the home is
progressively invested with new meanings and functions,
and becomes the emotional center of older women's lives. It is

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A. Cristoforetti et al. / Journal of Aging Studies 25 (2011) 225232

a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and

esthetics closely interweave with the emotional dimension.
After the loss of their partners, widows feel the need to
reconstruct the emotional map of their home. Our research
showed that the elderly widows built the emotional sense of
place through four distinct processes for the construction of a
place's situated meaning: Heart displacement, The showcase of the self, Refuge as an inviolable space and
Introjection of external spaces. In other words, in widowhood elderly people redene symbolic and physical places
that before have not existed or has had different meanings.
These processes of meaning construction can be explained as
conscious and unconscious coping strategies in response to
events with a strong impact. Elderly people realize these
strategies by associating new narrations and emotions to
home and objects, introducing technologies, collecting and
displaying artifact of memory, and performing different
activities and daily routines.

Heart displacement
Heart displacement was one of the principal processes
that occurred upon widowhood. When the spouse was still
alive and the household was still united, the center of the
home coincided with its heart, i.e. with the place where the
members of the family gathered together. It therefore
assumed a strong emotional-affective value, as testied by
Giulia2:
Here, around this table, on these benches, we gathered so
many times, thirteen fourteen of us. Together with the
table and the benches we also got that little bell over there,
and now when people come to visit me, they ring it.
During widowhood, this meaning system was re-elaborated
in nostalgic and situated terms within a dimension of memory.
The center of the home assumed a new meaning and came to
coincide with the place for performance of the activities and
routines ensuring control over the organization of everyday
life. Thus, the center of the home changed from its heart to a
control center.
We found that the heart displacement process usually
made the center of the home coincide with the kitchen. The
latter was represented and described as a multifunctional
place where heterogeneous activities took place: social
activities such as receiving family members; or coordinative
activities, which implied the use of calendars and memos as
reminders of tasks and deadlines. The other core activities
undertaken in the kitchen were cooking and eating; these
regulated the other activities of the day, organizing their
times. They therefore help in understanding as to why the
kitchen might be described as a coordination center. For
Tina, the kitchen once the heart of the home she said
with the advent of widowhood assumed a new meaning also
manifest in a spatialorganizational change. It was within the
kitchen that new technological artifacts were introduced.
Often gifts from the children, these artifacts were useful in
supporting the women's memories calendars, memos or
2

We use invented names to protect the privacy of the interviewees.

they were used for entertainment, for instance a radio,

which keeps you company and helps relieve loneliness
during mealtimes (Tina). The preparation of meals and their
consumption were the main activities performed in the
kitchen. They marked out the day's various phases: its
beginning (breakfast), the end of the morning (lunch), and
the day's closure (supper). Many of our interviewees, in fact,
described their days using the three meals as anchoring
points for their narratives, conrming that it was these that
structured the rest of the day. The existence of these routines
and the meticulousness with which they were performed
demonstrate that the everyday lives of these women were
embedded in a specic spacetime dimension from which
place attachment developed.
It is important to note, too, that as age advances, an elderly
person's geographic experience of the home grows increasingly restricted, with the conguration of places suited to
environmental centralization (Lawton, 1990; Oswald &
Wahl, 2005). Elderly people, in fact, create spot locations
where they can have everything at hand: telephone,
cellphone, TV remote control, switches, clocks, books, creams,
etc. The arrangement of such spaces allows elderly people to
avoid constant movement. As age advances, these places
become increasingly rich with artifacts, and this is often
symptomatic of reduced mobility. An example of this way of
organizing space was provided by Ornella, who, although she
did not yet have mobility problems, had over the years made
the center of her home coincide with her armchair and the
small table next to it. When describing this space, she said
that from it she had control over the whole apartment (she
could see the front door from the armchair) and could
perform all her main activities. On Ornella's side-table were
not only her cigarettes and ashtray but also books, creams, TV
remote control, telephones (cellular and landline), diaries,
magazines, and some crumbs of food (it was not in fact
unusual for Ornella to eat meals in her armchair). She was
seated in her armchair even when she was using her personal
computer. This place assumed for her the meaning of an
immunity spatial regime based on feeling secure at home
(Snchez-Criado, 2008).
The showcase of the self
The second process of place resignication is what we call
constructing the showcase of the self. In this case, the players
are the artifacts of memory which evince pride in a life spent
with loved ones (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981).
Evident in the homes of the widows observed was a clear
distinction between the creation of a public space, which
represented the showcase of the self, and a private space
which we shall discuss in the next section.
The showcase consists in the collection and display of
objects with strong symbolic connotations. Their symbolic
meaning can be understood on the basis of the social context,
because it characterizes objects that sustain development of a
personal representation through the assumption of a role, the
afrmation of an individualizing or conformist personal
feature, or reference to a socially constructed shared vision.
Such objects more often perform a commemorative and
celebratory function. They keep alive the process of reminiscence that some authors have termed the life review

A. Cristoforetti et al. / Journal of Aging Studies 25 (2011) 225232

(Romaniuk & Romaniuk, 1981), which is stronger among

widows. To use the classication drawn up by Sherman and
Newman (1978), the objects that tend to dene the
showcase of the self are: objects with symbolic value
(jewels, ceramics, and paintings), articles for self-expression
(musical instruments, paintings, and artistic materials of
various kinds), consumption articles (objects for entertainment like a television, a radio and books), and photographs,
the most frequent category. Understanding the meanings
attributed to possessed objects requires recognition that they
are often lived as a part of the self: Our fragile sense of self
needs support, and this we get by having and possessing
things (Tuan, 1980, p. 472). Objects thus become an
important component of the sense of self because they are
incorporated into the extended self. Following this line of
thought one may say that people are, also, the sum of the
objects and things that they possess. People therefore tend to
act in a way not separate from their possessions, owing to the
operation of processes like personalization (the projection of
one's self and identity in objects), extension (the conscious
use of objects to represent important aspects of oneself), and
embodiment (the degree of fusion between self-representation and the object) (Rubinstein, 1989).
The showcase of the self, which for the widows interviewed was therefore an extension of their selves, usually
coincided with a part of the living room, the only place in the
home where the women accepted their few visitors. Lara, for
instance, kept photographs of her deceased husband taken at
happy times, of her son and nephew who lived faraway, of
dead pet dogs, and holiday souvenirs in her living-room and
the adjoining corridor. The objects displayed by Lara, and
which she also showed to us during the follow-up interviews,
had been accumulated during her lifetime, but they had
acquired new meanings in her widowhood. When talking of
the past, Lara said that the purpose of those objects was to
show the hobbies that she shared with her husband, her love
for her son and nephew, but also her social status:
I'm attached to those knick-knacks that you can see up
there. They're souvenirs from trips with my husband; they
are all reminders of foreign countries. The same goes for
the paintings; I've got one here and one in the other room.
If I raise my eyes, I think about our journeys together, about
him. Now it's summer and he's gone (Lara).
But since her husband's death, the meanings attributed by
Lara to her souvenirs had evoked different emotions. She was
prompted by the objects to recount, not episodes in her life,
but the emotions that are socially acceptable for a widowed
woman to feel: the loneliness due to her husband's absence,
her nostalgia for a faraway son and nephew, the melancholy
of remembering journeys to distant lands that she would
never see again. Those objects therefore constituted for Lara a
showcase of the emotions that could be socially shared when
she had guests.
Also Franca had reconstructed her showcase after the
death of her husband. She had mainly done so by displaying
the religious pictures that were her passion and the diaries
that she kept in a bookcase in the hall. When we had gained
Franca's trust and she allowed us into her home to collect the
cultural probe materials, she immediately took the opportu-

229

nity to show us her diaries. They contained notes on the

lectures that she had attended at the University of the Third
Age. The importance of these diaries in representing Franca's
life was also apparent from what she had written in her
cultural probes diary: My life as a wife and mother passed in
a ash. The University of the Third Age has been a ray of
sunshine in my widowhood. It has opened a window for me
on worlds that I didn't know. The importance of constructing
a place in the home which represented the public part of the
widows' lives was evidenced by another testimonial, which
highlighted the importance assumed by objects of the
memory: Everything becomes important at our age, the
small objects which remind us of more or less happy periods
in our past (Lorena). Also Niva had taken pains to construct a
space in her home representing what for her was the most
important aspect of life: My intellectual and relational life is
very important for me, and I never miss an opportunity to
make it even fuller. For Niva, widowhood had freed her from
the burden of care-giving and enabled her to reappropriate
her life. She had represented this change by reorganizing her
son's bedroom and using it as her personal study. It was there
that she enjoyed receiving guests and talking to them about
how she manages her time. Her case was very similar to that
of Veles, a modiste, who had converted her son's former
bedroom into her personal atelier, where she had hung
photographs of wedding dresses that she had sewn and of the
brides who had worn them.
Evident from the foregoing discussion is that objects with a
symbolic value, objects for expression and consumption are
essential for the maintenance of a sense of self, especially when
the identity is thrown into crisis by events, like widowhood,
which provoke radical changes in a person's life. Such objects, in
fact, often assume the role of transitional objects (Winnicott,
1971), and they are distinguished by their ability to ensure a
sense of identity for the elderly person and to furnish
ontological security. In the following section we show how
objects are decisive in processes of place resignication.
While in this section we have illustrated the crucial function
performed by objects in construction of a public space a
showroom, so to speak in the next one we describe their role
in constructing the meaning of a space with characteristics
opposite to those just seen. This we call the inviolable space.
A refuge as an inviolable space
As said, the process of constructing the showroom in
widowhood is accompanied by another place resignication
process which consists in the re-denition of an inviolable
refuge within the home. In this process, the boundary
between the private and public spheres is perceived as a
border. The home is a nest, a burrow in which melancholy
often prevails. Thus very apparent is the distinction within
the home between the space open to the public, namely the
showcase of the self, and the private dimension, the refuge.
The bedroom is the inner sanctum of the home. It is
generally an inviolable place, esthetically pleasing, and
semantically rich in meaning, for it comprises cherished and
intimate memories. The inviolability of this place was signaled
by the scant material collected about it by the participants. It
was the most private space in their homes; it was there that
they felt protected. The analysis of the diaries and the maps

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showed that the widows used a variety of metaphors to

describe this space, all of them connected with the dimension
of privacy and inviolability: refuge and nest were the most
evident examples. Unless the widows suffered from insomnia,
a disorder widespread among the elderly, problems or fears
were left outside the bedroom. It was in the bedroom that,
before falling asleep, the widows took stock of the day and of
their lives. It was the place where they thought about times
past and reected. This room was also the place where the
widows could perceive the absent presence of their
partners. For this reason it has enormous emotional value.
As one interviewee puts it, the bedroom is the most important
place for her because it was the locus of intimacy; it is there
that memories of her husband lived and that things talk
about him. Indeed, on a map she had written Adam and Eve
to describe her bedroom, which she associates with spiritual
calm and the heart:
I have photos of my husband in all the rooms, always with
owers of course. There are too many of them, but for me
they're not too many. There's one in particular which I put
into a little heart and took with me when I went to
hospital or during holidays, also when we sometimes
took separate holidays (Lorena).
The case of Lara yields further understanding of the
difference between private and public spaces in the home. As
already said, Lara had furnished her living room and corridor
so as to have objects on which she could anchor narratives
about her family and her life. The stories narrated and the
feelings expressed were those to be expected from someone
living in widowhood. Her bedroom likewise appeared to be
an extension of the showcase of the self. But her narratives
about the objects made evident the different meanings
attached to them, and to the room containing them. In her
cultural probes diary Lara wrote that, before falling asleep,
My eyes rest on the simple but highly personal drawing of
[her nephew]. The memories immediately ood back
when he was small, with grandmother when she had just
moved, him playing with the dog (). A long outpouring
of impressions and feelings, some able to give me
according to my mood joy and sweet nostalgia, others
that are so sad, like those which make me meditate on
things and people that have gone.
Also Wally had created her refuge. Given the small size of
her apartment, her refuge was an area of the living-room
where she kept letters and objects from her mother. It was
only during our fourth meeting in her home that she showed
us a box which she had described in her diary:
In a bigger box I have all my mother's letters. She has
written to me from after she got married until one month
before she passed away. I can't read them any more, my
eyes are so weak. But when I read them, it feels like my
eyes are being pricked by a hundred pins, and the tears
slowly slide down; it's a sweet, calm weeping.
Close by she kept her mother's music scores, which she
had loved so much. But she had no photographs of her

husband: this was her refuge, and memories of a failed

marriage were not allowed into it. One object, and the story
told by it, helped Tina dene her nest:
I have an image of the Madonna above my bed. My mother
wrote on the back of it I want this to go to my daughter
Tina upon my death. Because we are two sisters. I was
conceived and born beneath that Madonna. Even though
I'm a non-believer, that Madonna is dear to me.
Our discussion on the construction of private and public
spaces in the home has analogies with Zerubavel's (1981)
notion of social time and his thought on the normative and
ordinative purpose of separating time between sacred and
profane. Identifying similarities with medieval monastic life,
Zerubavel argued that events, activities and routines coincide
in contemporary industrialized societies and become at
one with their temporal order. As a consequence, particular
periods of time become inevitable containers of quotidian
events. The spaces created in their homes by the widows thus
became settings for emotions, activities, and possible relationships delimited by invisible boundaries created by the
emotional meanings attributed to them in terms of accessibility and inviolability. The former were the profane spaces in
the home, the latter were the sacred spaces.
The introjection of external spaces
Besides the processes described above there is a fourth
one: the process of introjection of external spaces whereby a
non-domestic space is transformed into a domestic one: a
vegetable garden, a balcony, or an area outside the home are
lived as internal spaces, behind the boundary with the public
sphere. Within the home there exist intermediate spaces like
windows, a balcony or a terrace which fulll the function of
bringing the outside into the home.
This introjection of external spaces was exemplied by
Franca's terrace, which was a garden in miniature. Franca
devoted a great deal of space in her diary to stories about her
owers:
The Christmas roses I buy in August from some or other
orist. I leave them in the mountains until the rst chill of
winter. Then I bring them into town and put them on the
balcony. Not too much in the sun. Normal amounts of
water. In November it's like a birthing. A burst of lovely
owers. They don't let you down. This year fully thirty of
them bloomed. They're beautiful in their simplicity. At
Christmas I bring them inside to enjoy them and put them
on the upper staircase if it's cold outside.
In her story Franca uses strongly humanizing terms:
growing a ower or a plant is not experienced as a simple
domestic activity, but rather as care-giving action that
recalled Franca's experience of maternage (mothering)
when she had looked after her husband and the children,
now grown up. Franca takes care of her plants every day:
watering, cutting the death leaves, controlling they are
exposed to sunlight and the vessel does not become too small.
It is interesting to note, moreover, that this passion was
also a way to take measure of the outside: Today I bought

A. Cristoforetti et al. / Journal of Aging Studies 25 (2011) 225232

three primrose plants. Last year, same day, same month, I paid
fty cents apiece. This year instead eighty-nine cents.
However, Franca was not the only interviewee to invest in
the activity of caring for owers. Although Lorena had only a
very small apartment, this had not prevented her from
creating a small garden on her kitchen windowsill. But she
could only have cut owers in vases instead of potted plants.
During our visits for interviews she explained how she cared
for them:
I want them to last as long as possible. So I change the
water very often, if it's very hot I put in a chunk of ice, cut
the stems at a slant, one bit at a time. Someone told me to
add half an aspirin to the fresh water, is that right?
Nor did the small size of her home prevent her from
engaging in particularly enjoyable activities:
I always buy primroses as soon as the rst ones arrive in
February. I immediately transplant them with all their
roots into a box with some soil. There are three of them in
my box. If it isn't too cold I put them in front of the French
window and enjoy them for the whole of their owering.
Also the garden and the vegetable plot were lived as part
of the home. These places were emotionally connoted
because they had plants and owers with which affective
relationships were established through tender care-giving.
Iole, for instance, considered herself fortunate that her
neighbors let her take care of their small plot of land. Without
children, Iole had suffered greatly from loneliness after the
death of her husband, and the garden had become the place
to which she could devote her energies. She spent almost the
entire afternoon in her small vegetable plot, especially in
summer when she could gather the fruits of her labors, like
courgettes and green beans.
From the participants' stories it emerged that they had
established strong emotional relationships not only with the
plants and owers that they cared for, but also with all the
natural elements with which they came into contact. They
made frequent references to the seasons, the climate and the
weather. Apparently banal instruments like a thermometer or
barometer acquired emotional connotations from their ability
to create a bond with nature. Every morning, before going
out, I look through the window and when the sky is gray my
mood becomes gray too. So I check my little meteorological
station composed by thermometer or barometer (Franca).
Moreover, the interviewees very frequently described the
view from the windows of their homes as crucial: the
presence or absence of a view of the mountains or other
natural landscapes, in fact, performed a key role in their
psychological well-being because it inuenced their moods.
Concluding discussion
Our aim in this paper has been to analyze the re-denition
of space and place that occurs in aging and as it often
happens after the partner's death. We have shown that the
widows behaved as meaning-makers and constructed invisible boundaries that delimited different places within their
homes. These boundaries were perceived, constructed and

231

deconstructed by various sensemaking processes, which

showed how the spatial/temporal and emotional dimensions
are closely bound up with each other.
The rst process heart displacement reconstructs the
center of the home. This coincided in the past with the spaces
in which the family used to gather together. In this
reconstruction process, the center of the home is situated in
a new spatialtemporal and emotional container identied in
relation to the function that it must perform as the center for
coordination and control of the day's activities. Place
attachment develops in relation to the sense of security that
this place transmits; security that must be read in two senses:
certainty that the day's activities will be carried out as
required; and scheduling of the day.
The second process the showcase of the self and the
third one the inviolable space are closely interconnected,
and they construct two spaces antithetical in terms of
accessibility and violability. To use Zerubavel's terminology,
the construction of the showcase of the self corresponds to
the construction of a profane space to which guests who enter
the home are granted access. The third process instead gives
rise to a space that becomes the setting for emotions,
activities, and relationships which are instead denable
sacred because they are marked out by invisible and
inviolable boundaries. In these two processes we note the
emotional investment made in objects and their symbolization synthesized by Rubinstein (1989): personalization
(projection of the self and identity in objects), extension
(the conscious use of objects to represent important aspects
of the self) and embodiment (the degree of fusion between
the self-representation and the object). If the narratives, and
therefore the emotions and memories, activated by these
objects are socially shareable, we are in the domain of the
profane; if instead they are intimate and private we are in the
domain of the sacred.
The last process that we have described is introjection of
external spaces into the home. This space has strong
relational value: it coincides with the action of taking care
of owers, plants, or entire gardens. It recalls the maternage
activities once performed by the widow, and it replaces the
care that she previously gave to her partner.
In conclusion, the ndings of our research explain how the
elderly use complex coping strategies, in response to events like
the loss of a spouse which strongly impact on their lives, which
consist in the semantic restructuring of their domestic environment. The signication processes that we have identied may be
activated both consciously and unconsciously. They take the form
of complex psycho-social dynamics which subtend a set of needs,
desires and emotions. The changes that take place internally to
elderly people as they endeavor to adapt to a new life-condition
come about externally as processes of place denition and
redenition which can be expressed with spatial metaphors:
move, relocation, exposure, delimitation, etc. Objectifying these
dynamics in their life environments enables the elderly to assure
their psycho-physical and social well-being, maintain a sense of
continuity amid change, and stabilize their identities.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Silvia Gherardi for her careful reading of
the rst draft of this paper and for her advice. We gratefully

232

A. Cristoforetti et al. / Journal of Aging Studies 25 (2011) 225232

acknowledge the support given to us, and the constant

supervision of our elderly respondents, by all the practitioners working at the social centers involved in the project:
the Centro Servizi Anziani, the A.P.S.S. Margherita Grazioli,
and the Universit della Terza Et e del Tempo Disponibile di
Trento.
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