Giovani Percolla is the protagonist of the novel, a man grown in the cotton wool, cuddled by three sisters, victim of a timidy that hides the desire of a woman. But he is arrived at the age of 36 years without loving experiences. At a certain moment of his life, he finds complaisant friends and start him to attend brothels and in a special way a big prostitute. In this way it makes a good experience of the loving pleasure, but not knowing the woman. At a certain point he meets Ninetta, a continental girl, whose look bewitches him; and he can’t live without the memory of that alive “lightning of her eyes”. It’s the first time he is fallen in love; his customs are upset by this passion. The three sisters look dismayed at Giovanni who asks to make the bath every sundays now; who sings just in the time when he was usual to make the siesta, rejecting all that they lovingly offer him. He finally decides to leave his sister’s house and to leave his old friends. He, who had been always contrary to the marriage, now marries Ninetta. The pages of the marriage are between the most pleasant of the book: the old lover who cries because she can’t wear the white suit for bride; the old bachelor who cries to the thought that he will has to die in his iron bed; the priest who apostrophizes the “teacher” Giovanni.
But the two bridegrooms have to leave Sicily to go to Milan; here their habits suffer a trauma; Giovanni’s life become active, fast, dry and with frequent cold showers. Men’s looks that are placed heavy, creeping, clammy, red on Ninetta, give him dizzines of anger. He is contended in the living rooms of the women who ascertain that “he is of the seventynth century, baroque of constitution, but a beautiful baroque; they ask him news about Sicily, of the summer baths, of the orange trees, and of all those things that fascinate the strangers. But his sensuality is attenuated, even if he abandons to pleasant flirtation, but without that sinful position that made spicy his relationships in Catania, until he return to Sicily, to the sensuality of his youth, to the uses of his old houses and habits of his sister’s food and the siesta in the voluptuosness of the bed of bachelor.