Cronache di poveri amanti, published in 1947, paints an unforgettable picture of the Florence of the first years of fascism. In the Corno Street, the road of the old Florentine district where Pratolini spent his adolescence, it hedges and alive, with private and common stories, a world of men and women whose existences are woven, they are illuminated each other, now opening themselves to the hope and the love, now refolding themselves in the pain and in the death. Translated in over twenty languages, transformed in film from Carlo Lizzani in 1954, Cronache di poveri amanti has been one of the greatest world successes of the postwar period.
The Cronache are the representation in the worker and artisan Florence in the period in which Fascism is in ascent, strengthening itself more and more, it compressed the strength and the vitality of the working class. The whole story is narrated as by a person that from a window of Corno Street (and in this case a Lady that always keep alert and observing her maids resembles him) observes every movement and every person, to deduce thoughts, passions, initiatives, crimes, sufferings. Corno Street is, after all, the stage where the antifascist circumstance in Florence synthesizes itself, besides the play of his secular inhabitants. The city breathes inside, even if those people of Corno Street don't want. Here the District has become a psychological and human fact, almost losing its topographical character. And the same autobiography has become history, a history dramatically represented. A history rather that it is projection of the collective hope of the working class.
The vitalism, the optimism, the happy aura that, despite the poverty and the bad lucks circulate in the Corno Street, they find an explanation in the extrovert and confident moment that Pratolini lived in the years between 1944 and 1946, when the Communism seemed to could arrive to the power. This trust let him realize a happiness that in the reality of their existence his characters would never have been able to have, so much that can seem correct to sustain that between the historical reality and the narrative reality of Pratolini there is a true division. " So Maciste and all the positive and happy figures of the vitalism of Pratolini, in the Cronache and in the other books, are rather figures of a collective dream to which Pratolini generously leaves himself, figures a great deal more than the irreality, that deny with their existence the whole reality that under and around threatens them, rather than figures of a reality" (LONGOBARDI).
But the reality of the District and Corno Street has remained a real thing, a popular story reconstructed in novel, rather in a novel that excludes and that immediately cuts out the autobiographic self, that was accustomed to characterize the other previous works of Pratolini. Pratolini in this novel" proceeds to move his old world in a vaster dimension where the sentimental wealth (the human liking) is a not lyricist and privacy value anymore, but collective and political value. The environment and the subject are always his: Florence, the poor districts, the struggle of the minute people against Fascism and the poverty. The cleverness, that coloured and figurative, and that compositive, has strengthened. But the tone is different: sometimes he points on the epic, on the saga (the night of the miracles) and he grazes the illustrative; sometimes he strengths his spontaneity and he uses the emotion as a social claim. The prose has lost in authenticity what it earned in wisdom; he has been forced to maneuver his characters and to fix an itinerary of comfort for them where they were prepared to the right cut for his emotion. The sign of the style was becoming greater. The rush of the apparitions and the figurative images was always happy; but ideology was embodied in a scenography, in which the authentic characters of Pratolini (here the lady is perfect ) often felt ill at ease" (PAMPALONI).
Vitalismo and ideology
Certainly just in the character of Maciste this overlap of the ideology is warned on the scenographical dramatic force, when during the famous night of the apocalypse Florence is upset by the fascist hordes thirsty of blood and revenge. In that night Ugo begs Maciste to take the sidecar and to warn some parliamentary and antifascist men to hide themselves to escape the attack of the furious members of the Fascist action squad driven by the Pisano, with Carlino and Osvaldo, two poor men who try to get on in the party.
The action of Maciste in that occasion isn’t properly conducted in rigorous key of discipline of party; he is a communist to whom the Party has entrusted a charge of responsibility, but he is behaved as a man made of flesh and bones, marked to a generous feeling of comprehension and human solidarity.
The human vitalism that circulates between the pages of the book, particularly in the second part, overcomes and is superimposed to the same communist ideology, or better to that ideological political uncertainty that characterized in that years not only Pratolini but many other men of culture, united in the antifascist struggle but very uncertain and in disagreement to reconstruct the society after Fascism; in this sense the novel also discovers the historian and politic lack that had characterized the years from 1944 to 1947, for which those realistic figures of Pratolini have appeared in truth as symbols of a hope, of a wish, of a wait of social solidarity, more than authentic expressions of a social reality. His characters, are in short projections, figures of that they would have had to be, but they are not really yet. Their humanity is as stretched out towards the future waiting for a better world. But meanwhile they have overcome that moment of stasis sung by Montale" what we are not, what we don't want", infact now they know to want, they want to be something. This optimistic heroic vision of the man is the most authentic message of the novel.