Just like Per le Antiche Scale, the book is set in an asylum, and the protagonist, who is also the first-person narrator, is a psychiatrist.
There is no plot; rather, it is a fragmented narrative composed of descriptions of individual figures—mostly women—within the institution: patients, nurses, nuns, and peasant women from the countryside surrounding the asylum.
Some of them, such as Lella, play more than a fleeting role in the tale, yet generally they are all subsumed by madness, as though it were difficult to discern sanity from insanity.

With the mad who communicate their laws I easily settle in, we walk along the same track, and if a sudden onlooker were to judge on the spot which of the two is the sick one, he would find himself uncertain; and this exercise of mine, which on some days I repeat frequently, exhausts me and I return to my corridor in the mist of a vague anguish, almost a convalescent, as if those minutes I spent transferring into the mind of the madman, forsaking my own, were like going into hell, living in the circles, having crossed the cold waters of Hades, and returning to life with my soul still frozen by death

.
It is, therefore, a series of episodes which, despite their specificity and apparent disarray (almost diary-like), allow several narrative threads to be identified: the tenderness and wonder that emerge from the portraits.
It is not the physician writing, nor is there any search for an ideological imprint; the individual characters are described with affection, at times with irony, but always with the acute awareness that there is no escape from madness.
The theme of eroticism emerges, clearly revealing how loneliness often lies at the root of the path leading to madness; yet madness is also an inevitable fate, binding together both the poor and the rich.
Emblematic is the figure of Lella, who seemed to have emerged from her illness, yet it takes merely another woman showing an interest in the object of her desire (a purely dreamed-of affection) to plunge her back into a depressive crisis and thus into madness once more.
The balance is ever precarious.

The woman has a very beautiful face and, strangely, though she implores so, she seems on the verge of laughing, and at moments laughs as if in a blissful intoxication, as though touched in that instant by an amorous joy

.
Yet madness conceals itself.

Perhaps it was that woman, an ultra-flourishing blonde woman, exuberant and domineering; for several days she had been polite, sweetly accommodating in assisting with every service on the ward; indeed, like a sinless nun, she tended with all piety to another most petulant patient.
And this morning I read a letter of hers addressed to her husband where the words declared her spirit lusting for violence and murder

; the serenity of the Tuscan landscape, almost in contrast to the violence and disorder of the asylum.

The plain of Lucca sparkles with harvests from the burst of spring until autumn; it rests in a deep ellipse surrounded by mountains silhouetted clearly against the sky.
The Lucchese plain in summer is a shifting-swaying of laughing green, a witty conversation with every fruit and bud, and one’s sight varies and dances and is lost and is refreshed, and by no means do the mountains that distantly encircle it hinder that gladness

; the existential pain of the protagonist, whose anguish stems simultaneously from within himself and from the life of the asylum: the bond between his own existence and the fates of the mad seems the sole reason for overcoming an anguish that would otherwise prove unbearable.

My life is here, in the asylum of Lucca.
Here my feelings unfold.
Here I reveal myself honestly.
Here I watch dawns and sunsets, and time passes beneath my watchful gaze.
Inside a room of the asylum I study men and love them.
Here I wait: glory and death.
From here I depart for holidays.
Here, until now, I have returned.
And my desire is to make of every grain of this land a calm, orderly, universal speech

.
Yet there is hope, the love between creatures: all this allows the writer to say that there is, perhaps, a way out of madness and existential anguish.

And of little Lella I hope to say no more, for ample, if heaven has aided me, are the words I have spoken

.
The book, magnificent, is distinguished by an elegant style—imbued with a classical education—that admirably manages to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere, as though what is narrated were not real but rather the fruit of the author’s imagination and desire.
The phrasing, the choice of adjectives, and the diction, often bearing a distinctly Tuscan stamp, make the reading pleasurable while highlighting the dramatic weight of the subject matter.

The Free Women of Magliano