Declaredly autobiographic, Cronaca familiare is one of the most meaningful sources of the human and intellectual story of Pratolini. In the novel, dashed off on December 1945, it is narrated the genesis and the development of the affective relationship between the author and his brother Dante, called by their adoptive parents Ferruccio. The departure of the little brother from home, after the death of his mother, and his fosterage to the butler of a rich English lord, had become in the mind of the small Vasco a correct imprisonment in a gilded jail. In the imagination of the little boy, in fact, "his mama had died for his fault," and it is this unconscious conviction that prevents the immediate waiting for this brother blonde as an angel. The love between the two, however, grows with the passing of the years, up to become a real spiritual communion, brutally interrupted, once again, by the illness and by the death. The chronicle of this great family affection assumes, in the magistral tension of the novel-diary, a symbolic universal value, a grieved appeal to the real spiritual fusion between the brothers, grown in different but inclined social environments but pushed by the same desire of communication and by the same hunger of eternal feelings.
There is to the origins of this novel the memory of his condition of orphan offended by the precocious pain: but another baby is born while his mother is dying; a rich gentleman picks up that baby, also removing him with the name his condition, the dresses of the poverty in which he was born; also the remorse of his relatives is soothed by the fact that the choice was very cruel: or to surrender this child destining him to a life of comfort, or to hold and condemn him to the poverty.
In these terms the choice is also a blackmail: as an eternal blackmail impends on Via del Corno, blackmail of the poverty, of the police, of the middle class, of everybody.
A lyric-elegiac tone predominates on the narrative and evocative rhythm of this autobiographic book, of this family chronicle, which is not only an analysis of the loneliness and the incapability to live of the brother, by now dead, but also, of reflex, the internal history of the maturation of the personality of Pratolini, writer of memories. The tragedy of the brother raised and thought in a house of gentlemen is the testimony of the crisis and of the loneliness that accompanies the poor man, that doesn't know to live out of his environment, prived of the most dear and natural affections. The illness that kills Ferruccio perhaps has not been more serious than that that has annoyed the existence of Vasco: but Vasco had an affective force and a trust in the solidarity and in the friendship that has allowed him to overcome it, while the loneliness and the existential anguish, the missed love of the loved woman have ended with breaking off the existence of Ferruccio, raised in an environment different from his, and forever estranged by the most authentic affective life. But Ferruccio has committed so many errors that derive from his bourgeois education, because he has been raised by the adoptive father in the cotton wool, he has never been autonomous, he has never succeeded in becoming man, the pain to become man has missed too.
And therefore he has remained a failed of the life, of the school, of the love, because, the human experience having missed him, has mistaked also to choose his companion.
The tragedy of Ferruccio is fixed since his birth from the death of his mother: that death is the price that Ferruccio’ relatives pay for offering a better life to their child. Really, Ferruccio has succeeded in living in the comfort as a bourgeois, but he has learned anything of the struggle for survival, having never known the poverty, rather feeling ill at ease with the poors and almost despising the poor brother. But in fact Ferruccio is innocent of this blackmail of the riches that has conditioned his life in the loneliness and in the lack of the sincere and pure affections. " The whole book is on the rescue of his innocence, the move of the hate from it toward those people who used it, that gets that him, Pratolini, didn't know it, in the alive brother, immediately as innocence. With the awareness that has been the death and the physical suffering before the death to reveal him this innocence " (Longobardi, quotation drawn from Giacalone, ibidem). Certanily the innocence of Ferruccio is seen by Pratolini when the catastrophe has already happened in an irreparable way; just victim of that bourgeois education, in which his relatives hoped for the comfort of their child, Ferruccio absorbs just the biggest evils of that false education, loneliness, desperation, incapability to live, lack of affections; and, beeing unable to reenter in the rank of the poverty of his true family anymore, death arrives for him as a liberation. And the whole book is spread of this lyric grif of recovered innocence of his brother, of his spirituality and of his betrayed humanity, since his birth, when he was given from his relatives to a gentleman for a better life.