The occasion from which these roman stories were born has to be connected to Moravia’s sensibility that can be conditioned in great measure by the directions that are opened to the culture in all its development. In 1952 and more over, until 1958-59, the populist theses that spring from Garrisci’s theories on a popular literature, they don’t leave Moravia indifferent, who is deluded to win the bourgeois conflict with the adoption of forms and ways and tastes born in breast to the proletariat, as the most spontaneous to verify a genuine available and flood of fervor human ethic. Moravia starts this cycle with the novel La romana, in 1947 and, passing through Storie romane and the novel La ciociara of 1957, he closes it in 1959 with the new Racconti romani.
But we have soon to underline that Racconti romani- because it has born from an external occasion- it isn’t worth to represent all the image of the people as it was in the intentions of the writer, from the linguistic point of view and from that of the”moral health” that the writer tried to recognize himself in.
And for a very simple fact, because from the people, from their language from their elementary vices circumscribed in these stories, the main defect of existential type of Moravia of Gli indifferenti almost always emerges, here, in these stories, broken in a lot of inaccurate ways, represented by human types who don’t put aside the purity and the popular instinctivity.
The external occasion from which these stories were born and of which we said at the beginning, it is in the contribution to the third page of the “Corriere della Sera”, where Moravia published punctually them.
The formulation of almost all the stories of the two collections is in first person (except I vetri) and the popular and suburban Rome of the fifties years is the scenary, but also the strange and talkative Rome, full of humors built by Moravia. The concreteness of the sketch, the rapidity of the action closed in few pages, and the singleness of the characters who are seen by Moravia with benevolent look, in their elementary reality, they have to be underline.
The central theme that countersigns them is almost always recognizable in the reaction to a lowest and suffered condition of the who live in a precarious way, with many difficulties and worries applying to endless expedient to close the day in a useful way but in the only elementary sense of physical satisfaction.
Or among bad sellers, storekeepers, workers, men-servants or handymen, there are people who are foced everyday to soffucate valid and moral motives, if only they can eat because they are branded by ancestral condition of povertry. The istinct of maintenance of these characters in the same for the intensity of that of other natural beings, who don’t have ideals of ethics and ethic, who don’t look at the future or they surprised themselves prone to the preservation or to the possession, but they live rather to the day, capturing every propitius occasion: the expedient, the implot, the deception are necessary for them.
Every story has linked to the others, rather tied up to them by this common imprint of suffering, so much that the series could continue to the endless, in the same misure in which the human cases are endless to narrate and to bring to the light.