With Gente in Aspromonte (1930), Alvaro reaches the full autonomy of his narrative style. The pages of this novel are born " not only from a fantastic transfiguration of regional life directed on the thread the memory, not only from a touched reconstruction of facts, persons, landscapes engraved in the soul to his leaning out to life, but also from a suffered participation to the poor’s people tragedy, that from centuries fight and succumb, often prey of tyrannical landowners, in an arid and desolate earth, and also from a continuous moral appointment that accompanies and drives the humbles toward the revolt and the ransom" (BALDUINO).
In this desolate earth, in this place of old social injustices and inveterate overcomings, Alvaro puts the human circumstance of Argirò an unfortunate shepherd, whose oxen and animals had in custody fall in a canyon, and must be sold for few money as meat of low butchery. The first clash between servant and master takes place when Argirò, accompanied by his child Antonello, goes to the master’s house, Filippo Mezzatesta, just covered by the shirt and from a pair of underpants that were laced to the ankle. Obviously the master, prey of the anger, doesn't want to hear reasons and attributes the death of his beasts to the carelessness and the bad intention of Argirò. He doesn't want to admit that it has been a misfortune, that has ruined the poor shepherd who will remain without job and without money now, because that little money drawn by the sale of the cows fallen in the canyon is also delivered to the master; and when this poor shepherd asks his half of the result, besides the offenses, the appellatives of blockhead, he also takes the threats, because he is dismissed and envoied in the middle of a road with the nightmare of the hunger for the imminent winter. The shepherd's child, Antonello, assists to the scene receiving a very bitter impression, if it is true that he was looking for his father’s hand with his little hand, scared by the threats and the insults of the master. But the fate is attacked against Argirò, to which also a small piece of earth, worked with desperate work, goes in ruin crushed by a stream; even a pig is killed by the disease. It doesn't remain nothing but to be prey of the usurers and to let work his wife. His only hope is his small child, Benedetto, that becoming priest would give a beautiful revenge to his father. And one day he sends him to the seminar, after that the other child, Antonello, is engaged to work out of his country to maintain him to the studies. And the poor Antonello makes the hardest works to maintain his brother at the seminar; but Argirò has against himself the envy of all the townsman, that hardly bear his wish to rise socially; neither, on the other hand, he makes something to not excite it; rather he says everybody that when his child will be priest he would put to place the peculators and the arrogants. The life of the poor Argirò becomes for this reason unbearable: they set fire to his stall, they kill his mule that was the only mean of his job of conveyor and they play other tricks on him. But nobody speaks and denounces the responsible of these misdeeds. Meanwhile Antonello loses his job and returns to his country unemployed and sick. Only he will avenge his father and all the shepherds of the country; in fact he goes to the mountain and there first he burns a wood of Fillipo Mezzatesta and then he kills his livestock giving the meat to the poors. It is dramatic the reaction of Mezzatesta that looks for, with every mean, to save his ownerships. But nothing he can do against the brigand Antonello that distributes his livestock to the poors and destroys the picked of his master; until, hunted by a policemen, he surrenders saying: " I can finally talk to the Justice. Because there is wanted to be able to meet it and to tell it my fact! " Meanwhile the Mezzatesta, that have done up to yesterday the masters and the peculators of the poor shepherds, have gone in ruin; and the shepherds, that up to yesterday have been scorned and exploited by the masters, they have finally found a street of liberation and revolt, a protest that somehow introduces them to the society’s justice. The story wants to put in evidence this taking of conscience of the shepherds world that finally succeed in manifesting their protest against the unfair society that has forgotten their humanity. "
Gente in Aspromonte becomes the tragic story of a secular, true and quivering bump, without nothing of realistic and boring, and where objects, proverbs, cries, together with a valid sense of a simple spoken dialogue , recomposed without any literary codification, they are melt in values and in tensions permeated of magic contents" (Cara).