It is a novel between history and invention, troubled matured for a long time in the mind of the author. One of the reasons for this suffering is the need to liquidate the romantic vein, for" the exactness and the scruple of the historical reconstruction."
The fable that winds the circumstance is in ironic purpose, and the irony is managed around a precise historical moment, central in the history of the South: the two years 1860-61, that see the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom, the ephemeral Garibaldian enthusiasm, the birth of the Savoy State, the explosion of the southern " difference " and the first time of the brigandage after the unification.
In Signora Ava, it is shinily represented the social stratification characteristic of the epoch; there is a parasitic rural middle class, personified by the usurer Mr. Eutichio De Risio; there is a not blunted middle class and rather sensitive to a certain social justice, open to the liberal ideas and to the Garibaldian innovations; there is a low inactive, conformist clergy, loyal to the affairs of patronage of the rural middle class; there is a dominated, resigned country class, squeezed by intact feudal relationships, and Pietro Veleno constitutes the typical character that knows, or believes to know, to have to die farmer as farmers they have been his parents and his ancestors; there are some priests of farmer origin too, poor but rebellious in their way, not conformist, impatient without being revolutionaries and victims without resignation: Father Matteo Tridone.
The family De Risio, around which the whole romantic circumstance is moved, is not but a metaphor, but historical, and the same place of Guardialfiera becomes the ideal point of view of the writer, from which to maneuver his means of investigation, of recognition, of introspection and of judgment.
The plot is untied in two times (the two parts of the book) perfectly functional the one to the other. The first one reproduces the static moment of the reality of Molise, wound around the family De Risio and defined, almost crystallized, in a social-economic structure of still feudal type; gestures, grudges, customs, impatiences ferment inside it, regulated and compressed by an order of institutions and conventions that are almost identified with a law unmovable of nature; they are moved, besides, and they teem with existences, or better shreds of existences, whose constitutive reasons seem to sink in that order out of which they don't have sense and they don't find space. The second time represents the moment of the flaw of that reality, when the news of the big events of the two years ' 60 - ' 61 arrive to instigate different and often contrasted states of mind, to start illusions and hopes, fears and presentiments, to rake up old and new ideas, old and recent memories. It is an unusual, amazing gust of " history " that is insinuated in the minds and it upsets them, because the " history " decides to turn the " nature " upside-down. Once again, it is the circumstance of the family De Risio to recapitulate, to use metaphores in this clash between " history " and " nature ": the breakup of the family De Risio - emblematic in the escape of Antonietta with Pietro Veleno, in the death of the Colonel, in the inexorable hebetude of Mr. uncle and even in the bleak double betrayal of father Eutichio, prey of the anguish of a catastrophic rendering of accounts - the spy of the sunset of an epoch marks and certain the starting of ideal strengths, by now possible to tangle and to divert, in which it is grafted, even if with the weight of all the ambiguities, that authentic insurrectional phenomenon of mass that was the brigandage.
The second part is ideologically more indicative than the direction on which the narrative search of Jovine will continue to move. More than the prosecution of the fresco of the first part, it is shaped as scenery of a tragedy that feels like past and present: the tragedy of the illusion, of the desperation and even - from the point of view of Jovine - of the missed historical " occasion ".