"What did Annarella See?"analyzes Carlo Damasco's cinematic adaptation of Anna Maria Ortese's short story "Un paio di occhiali" and argues that the trope of the "insopportabilita' della realta'" constitutes the connective tissue between Ortese's story and Damasco's film.  This trope generates different options of "being in the world" for Eugenia and Annarella, the respective protagonists of short story and film. it is upon this contextualized and historicized notion of "being in the world" that Damasco's adaptation generates a powerful reflection of Ortese's estranged and estranging gaze, and the revolutionalty, if veiled, knowledge it envisioned.