The book is a collection of short stories published by a very young Matilde Serao at the age of twenty-two.
In 1883, the twenty-six-year-old author, after "four years of militant artistic life," wished she could "change everything," finding these juvenile writings flawed in form, lacking "depth of impressions," and muddled by an "encumbrance of ideas."
Reading them more than a century later, this judgment appears overly harsh: Serao approaches the world with surprising lucidity and a disruptive, mocking zest for life.
In the story entitled Per i bagni, the author imagines a friend writing to Lulù, voicing a suspicion:

your bathing suit is too elegant.
Of dark blue linen, embroidered with red thread, (...) the large straw hat with its cluster of poppies; the little straw-cloth shoes, tied with criss-cross ribbons—too much elegance to remain idle and ineffective.
(...) Your bathing suit is too pretty for you not to want to show it to someone with your little figure inside it.
Is it not so? (...) Do not smile, wretched creature, do not lose yourself in your dream: the cruelest disillusionment awaits you, the most horrible reality.
(...) If you see a man in a bathing suit in the water, stripped of his unpleasant garments, he seems to you the most pitiable, the most lamentable thing on the face of the earth.
(...) Oh Lulù, you who are neither an American, an emancipated woman, an old maid, a supervised wife nor a supervising one, but simply a fair, adorable creature, (...) Oh fair-haired, blue-eyed, gentle Lulù, oh my little woman, do not go swimming with those gentlemen and those ladies!

Far removed from mere appearances, averse to the bourgeois destiny of woman, the young Matilde does not want a

fine, light, scented, subtle love, abandoned, resumed; (...) but nothing more than a shadow, a pale sort of love

.
Nor, however, does she intend to be swept away by passion, to become subservient to a man’s will; and she wonders, alongside the protagonist of her story Fulvia, whether she will be able and will know how to love.
In truth, the writer wishes to experience social and cultural events intensely, rather than shutting herself away in a confined domestic sphere.
Even when she sketches the "fleeting and sweet impressions" of the Campanian countryside and comfortable bourgeois settings, even before the sunset over Pompeii, the writer acknowledges that

we enter into life, pale and feverish pilgrims, with an ardent desire for great deeds, great passions, great horizons.
(...) And tossed about, shaken, driven forward, jolted in the perennial struggle between idea and word, dismantling old ideals to forge new ones, (...) we are intimately happy

.
Where to stand? Serao asks herself in the story Alla decima Musa.

Above: a quiet, silent little room, with a softly warm atmosphere.
A lamp sheds its steady, peaceful light over the pages of an engaging book; here and there a smile of friendship or love, the hours slipping by slow and placid, like beautiful, languishing figures.
Below: the street, wet, muddy, slippery with mire, trampled by thousands of feet; (...) the coming, the going, the encounter, the jostling of a dense, continuous, ever-renewing crowd, speaking, laughing, shouting, clamoring, singing, yelling.
(...) Then the reader is seized by a nostalgia for the street, for the fog, for the agitation; he feels a sharp desire to plunge into that tumult, to enjoy that spectacle, to contribute his share, to feel small, obliterated, absorbed: he fights no longer, he yields: and with a gigantic gust, the street vanquishes the little room

Perhaps, as Serao herself noted, there is too much of an "encumbrance of ideas," as is natural in an adolescent; yet the stories remain delightful because they exude, through the characters, the descriptions of settings, and the very words themselves, an irrepressible sensuality, a desire for fresh transgression.
The narrative style is varied, shifting from tight dialogue to meticulous description, sustained throughout by a rich and elegant lexicon.
The syntax is not always assured, the punctuation is at times rough, but the prose is effective, striking straight to the mark.

Why read it? It is a wonderful discovery.

From Life