The novel, although “choral”, is practically centralized on two female figures: the “Caffettèra” Elvira, and Nannina, a girl that has suffered and suffers the deprivation and the dangers of the war and of the postwar period. Tired to labor with the smuggling of foodstuffs on count of her brother-in-law and her sister, Nannina looks for shelter and protection near the authoritative Caffettèra of the “Bar Babilonia”in Speranzella, the long road that crosses the “Districts”, one of the most characteristic neighborhoods in Naples; the woman welcomes her kindly, convinced by a “magician”, the commendator Vincenzo Lonegro, respected by the populace with the nickname of “Teacher”, especially for his dress of seller of hopes, that Nannina will bring fortune to her and to the monarchic cause. Elivra is convinced to possess a quality of clairvoyant: she has had some tests of it, and she will have a clear one seeing Nannina suffering an attempt of rape by an American soldier, that then will accuse her of being bearer of syphilis. Of this recognized superiority Elvira awares herself organizing demostrations and picking up funds in favor of the monarchy. Mr. Mele, a ruinded noble that has however made money trafficking with “the English” gives her one hundred liras for the “cause”; the Caffettère hides them, but then not finding them, she unjustly accuse of the theft her eldest child, Michele, that leaves the fatherly hose, where he will return only to reconcilie with the dying mother.
Dead Elvira, the management of the cafe passes to her husband, Ciccillo, ex male nurse at the Incurabili, that has left the hopital to take care of Nannina,of which he has fallen in love with from a long time. Nannina and Michele, tired of unfair suspects, of incomprehensions and desirous of a new life, secretly leave together for the North, and they are believed died in sea; Pascalotto, the small child of the Caffettèra, that doesn’t succeed in living without his brother, wants to follow him in the death, and let drowning himself a few before a letter of Michele comes.
The life of the Speranzella emerges from the pages of the novel with all its vivacity, however without granting anything to the folklore: Bernari is as always too careful - and in Speranzella the danger of a skidding is always in trap - to the historical and human situation of the world that he represents. Also in this occasion, therefore, as “every time that naples is looked at, sight, represented, narrated, investigated in depth, without any easy pietistic or caricature concessions, Naples is transformed in what it is: a grey city, violated by secular injustices, with a foot still in the barbarity, in the idolatry and in the superstition, a city that is a perfect completed world, closed as an impenetrable egg and of which unfortunately there is well little to laugh. Those people who have tried to penetrate in this dark egg full of labyrinths and traps, have not almost always obtained victory, but at times they have illuminated big zones of this new kingdom. Those people that instead have reduced to walk up and down for the beautiful, shiny, splendid surface of the egg, not caring of what could be in the inside, but believing of having discovered who knows what, while really they had photographed the outside of this world, they have been considered the true interpreters”.
The fact is that Bernari’s characters, and particularly the many of Speranzella, never fall in the sketch, also where they are strongly characterized, because the writer transfers there with naturalness the documentary historical element; and it is a superimposing that if one side keeps away the invention to the easy emphasis of colour, from the other it lets leaven the political and moral element of the novel in likely figures that are never still heavy puppet-wrap of acceptable messages that are more or less inactive.
Proninent in Speranzella is the conversed structure; that allows the author of beeing out of his narration, to see facts and characters move on the big stage of the popular street and to descibe them without dangerous subjectivism.
The separation of the author, that seems to take back in a key slightly varied the expedient of the subtitle-summary of story-teller put at the beginning of every chapted of Tre operai, realizes the extraordinary climate of direct “setting”, of immediateness and spontaneity of action with simple means.
To grant to the characters all their autonomy, Bernari needs a particular linguistic instrument. The problem was thorny; the writer was worried of “a double choice, about the reality and the language in which express that reality”.
The solution adopted by Bernari is the happy hybridization language-dialect of Speranzella; through which the writer doesn’t already inted to locate colouristically the action of the novel, on the contrary to represent a precise cultural “reality”, of which the dialect is environment, psychology, way to be and to communicate. It appears in all evidence in this “experiment”, as we have already had occasion to notice, the presence of Verga’s teaching.