The Metello (1955) is set ao the apex of the development of Pratolini’s themes and it represents its narratively decisive moment in realistic key. The novel, that wants to be in autonomous way the first part of a trilogy, Una storia italiana, on the period that goes from 1875 to 1945, narrates the human, loving, politics stories of a socialist Florentine mason that goes form 1875 to 1902, mading up the epic of a famous strike of some building workers that folded up the hardness of the industrialists with the victory of the workers.
Metello Salani, having remained orphan in arms, is raised by a family of farmers. Still young, he moves to Florence from the country looking for job.
Obviously he doesn't know anything of the city, for inside vitality and for destiny he, as soon as they put the first box on his shoulders, even before becoming a worker, is instinctively socialist. Here he will meet some friends of his father that is died drowned in the Arno while he was working as sand digger. On him, foundling run away from the country, as in a blank sheet of any collective experience, the plant of the socialism blooms, that more natural and instinctive socialis. The only school is offered him by the difficulties of the life that he has to face and by the contacts with his companions at work. In a first time he works as laborer in a yard, then as mason he takes conscience of his condition of worker exploited by the master, the engineer Badolati, that is a good man and worker together with his workers.
It will be the situation same that has come to create the increase of the cost of life that will let him approach to the socialism at the end of the Eighteenth century, a great deal next to the anarchism.
The story delays a lot on Metello’s formation; before it is the influence of the elderly companions, then it is the experience of the jail where he has tightened friendship with socialist companions, it is also the sentimental and loving experience, first with the widow-teacher, then with Ersilia, the orphan girl of an anarchist dead on the job, that he will get married with full sentimental and politic conscience, since she will renounce to marry her master, sympathizing with him during the arrest because of a strike. It is a loving feeling that of Ersilia that is also a political conscience of class, and as such it becomes in Metello the instinctive rubber band of his solidarity with the other companions. It was the social ethic that was inferred from the words of the ex partisan Faliero in Un eroe del nostro tempo.
The second part of the novel talks about a weary strike of the masons in 1902, in which Metello is engaged together with his companions in a hard struggle for the triumph of the proposals of the Chamber of the Job illustrated by Del Buono.
He has sworn with the other companions to don’t surrender for any reason; rather it is one of the responsible of his yard. He is distracted for a little bit by his loving relationship with the beautiful Idina, but well soon the full awareness of his own duty takes over in him, and he sustains the strike until the end, facing with strength those people who wanted to desert, also facing the master with boldness and dignity. In consequence of the victorious strike, he is halted and after a period of detention in the jail he finally goes out and finds to wait for him Ersilia, always affectionate and faithful" with her child in her arms and the well combed hair, a pink shawl on the shoulders."