The action of the novel is always developed in Catania and always around Antonio Magnano, because also when he is in Rome, he is made object of a fame of irrestistible conqueror of the most powerful ladies of the Roman aristocracy. Antonio is really a handful and fascinating man but he has a serious defect of nature; the women are attracted and dominated by his irresistible charm but he is impotent and his loving conquest never come to conclusion. But his father Alfio Magnano, believing that his son has inherited his exceptional qualities of seducer and gall cicky, he goes magnifyng in Antonio this quality that he supposes is made by the diabolic beauty of the boy, describing conquests that do not exists and more powerful political relationships of every imagination, because he is lover of a minister’s wife. Then Antonio, returned to Catania, surrouded by the halo of conqueror and of influential man, is integrally absorbed by the provincial environment. Barbara Puglisi, a notary’s daughter who possesses half Paternò, is offered in marriage to him. Barbara’s beauty arrows inside Antonio’s meat as a deep shaking. After five happy months of engagement, with relative stolen kisses on the landing, the two people marry with a great party. The lack of children after three years of marriage is variedly interpreted: Mr. Alfio, Antonio’s father, not supposing leastly that his son is impotent, he observes that he had had a child after four years of marriage too; his cousin Edoardo, supposing that Antonio misuses “that thing”, deduces that the doesn’t arrive in that condition. But Barbara’s father, concrete notary and man without unrealistic ambitions, after he has verified how the things really are, during a tempestuos interview with Mr. Alfio, he reveals him that Antonio isn’t the cicky that he thinks his son to be; rather it’s happened that my daughter, after three years of marriage, is in the same way she is gone out of my house. For a hot-tempered man like Mr. Alfio, who enumerates among the honors of his family the best cickies of the city, the reaction is violent; but the unequivocal facts give unfortunately reason to the notary Puglisi, who wants to annul the marriage and to give his daughter in marriage to the duke of Bronte, a rich man.
Mr. Alfio makes of it a matter of honor and dignity, Antonio a matter of love, because his wife, informed of his impotence, has accepted in a first honor time the situation of fact and she had wanted to continue to love Antonio also without having intercourses with him.
But the clerical intrigue of the Bishop and the fascist politics has convinced Barbara to the annulment of the marriage and to contract new wedding with the duke of Bronte. Antonio shelters in the house of his parents, between the fury of his father who threatens to letting see the green mices to those repugnant marpions and fascists and the mother’s pain who learns with dizziness and remorse the news of his sons’s impotence, as she herself was responsible because of her prayers to God to mitigate his excessive sensuality.
Only spiritual shelter of the young Antonio is his uncle Ermenegildo, and intellectual man who had been abroad, and who sees the things from the top of his dissatisfaction and his skepticism. Antonio cofesses him the sad story of his impotence that seems more of psychological nature than physic. In the meantime Barbara, gotten the annulment, has aroused Mr Alfio and Antonio’s angers; and the things are increased when she celebrates solemnly in the church her new marriage with the duke of Bronte.
Meanwhile the war starts and, a night of 1943, Mr Alfio, while he comes back Rome, is surprised by an aerial alarm; instead of racing to the shelter, as the others, he goes to the house of a poor prostitute, to die and to ransom his son’s honor: “I want that all Catania knows that Alfio Magnano with his seventy years, goes with prostitutes. Sorry I don’t talk to offend you, as it’s true that I don’t want to offend you, as it’s true that I have gone to die here”.
Infact his body will be found among the ruballs after few days; and a stranger man will have also the shamelessness to write on his grave that he died to wash his son’s honor.
The truth is that also Alfio, despite he is antifascist, he’s sick of sexual vanity like the fascists, and his death is the expression of his sexual unrealistic ambition, that is the same of that fanciful and rethoric of the fascists. Also Antonio’s relatives are involved in the dishonor of the family and Edoardo is forced to resign from the podestà. After the end of the war, returning to the town, Antonio sees him again and he has a serious interview with his cousin, where his cousin reproaches him for his sexual obsession, saying him that the sex isn’t everyting. But, coming back home, after having made love with a maid, he calls his cousin that last loving adventure, arousing in Antonio a heat of envy that his cousin undersood thorugh the thread of the phone.
The Bell’Antonio can be considered Brancati narrator’s masterpiece for the thin humorous positon that winds with sympaty and often with melancholy his Sicilian characters, psychologically conditioned by a culture and a custom of sexual vanity that grazes the human tragedy to the obsession and the total anguish of the existence; but, this time, the human tragedy of the sexual impotence is introduced as cosmic desperation of eye, as desperate melancholy for the only happiness that makes us human beings by of which we can’t enjoy. It isn’t only a physical defect, but the sink of man without a “ubi consistam”
The sexual vanity of the fascist leaders, here, is in light and shade, a social background, a political unrealistic ambition hat combines in itself also the unrealsitic ambition.