La bella estate, that originally was La tenda in allusion to the tent of the painter that is its protagonist, tells the story of Ginia and her love consumed in a season. Ginia is initially a good girl, that works in an atelier and that conducts a life of simple and honest job together with her brother, that has come from the country to the city to work with her a short time before. But soon she meets Amelia, a corrupt model of experience, that poses for some painters of her acquaintance. Ginia is introduced by this friend in that ambiguous environment. There she assists to very provocative scenes between Amelia and a Portuguese painter, that gives hospitality to a soldier that paints, a certain Guido, a country strong and tall boy.
Ginia falles in love with this Guido, and, after having won the initial reluctance and her modesty, she will end up giving him herself in his study, behind the curtain of red velvet, also knowing that Guido doesn't love her. Then she will continue to give him herself less and less reluctant.
For Ginia, matured by that loving experience, the end of the beautiful summer comes, after having ascertained the indifference of Guido that at this point leaves her. She has only Amelia, which is not only syphilitic but she has toward Ginia a morbid and lesbian form of love. The ethic of the novel is still the theme of the loneliness. It is true that Ginia has faced the life with more courage than Stefano, going out of the jail and giving herself to Guido, that is to say establishing a relationship of love with him, but to what has it worth, if not to lose, with the awareness of her reached maturity, the happiness's illusion?
" The sense of desolation that has born from the passage from the innocence to the corruption still assures us how Pavese felt the insufficiency of the sex detached from the other roots of the human existence; for this reason Ginia doesn't find the maturity in the relationship with Guido but, at the end, she is forever confined in her loneliness that is apparent maturity " (VENTURI).