[...] as readers, we have the chance to see a few of these people, under unimaginable pressure, with chaos and violence everywhere around them, responding with transcendent and unforgettable moral beauty. These are not people born with special moral qualities, people who find it easy to be brave and honorable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are. As Anna's husband tells her: 'no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life.' Ginzburg shows us the possibility of this courage, she bears witness to the possibility, and reading her work we know and believe also.

[...] Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the twentieth century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog. As readers of this novel, we come to see and feel the inextricable relations between the inner and outer worlds of human beings. Ginzburg's novels manage not only to accommodate, but to place into a meaningful relationship, the intimate lives of fictional characters and the radical social and political changes unfolding around them. [...]

They used to go to the cemetery sometimes on Sundays, Anna, Giustino and Signora Maria. Concettina did not go, she never set foot outside the house on a Sunday ; it was a day she detested and she stayed shut up in her room mending her stockings, wearing her ugliest clothes. [...]

In the end Anna told him about the time when they burned the newspapers, herself and Concettina and Ippolito and Emanuele. Giuma did not show much surprise, he said he had suspected for some time that Emanuele was getting mixed up in politics, he was really an idiot. He didn’t like Fascism himself, but it was better to put up with it and it wasn’t worth the trouble of running risks, besides Emanuele ought to think of Mammina, if they put him in prison Mammina would go mad. He didn’t hold with Fascism himself, above all it was a provincial thing, it made Italy provincial, it prevented people from arranging exhibitions with fine pictures from abroad. Fascism was certainly an ugly, provincial, ignorant thing. But it wasn’t worth the trouble of getting oneself put in prison for such an ugly, clumsy thing, getting oneself put in prison was taking it too seriously. But there must be a revolution, Anna said. He started to laugh a great deal, he bent back and laughed, displaying all his wolf-like teeth. A revolution, he said, Anna wanted to start a revolution. No, he said, there was no need for that, because Fascism would gradually fizzle out by itself, like those rubber balloons that deflate themselves with a whistling noise. No, there was no revolution to be started and in any case even if a revolution did have to be started Emanuele and Anna would not be the people to do it. “And not Danilo either ? ” asked Anna. Not Danilo either, Giuma answered, not Danilo either, because he had married a wife who was too twisted and pinched.

[...] At first they had read Montale but then Danilo had asked him whether he knew about Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, yes, he knew about it, but he had told Danilo clearly that he didn’t want to hear any mention of things like that. Later on he would have to be a director of the soap factory, and Emanuele also would have to be a director, and so they could not possibly be on the side of Karl Marx, they were the owners of a factory and they could not be on the side of those who wished to hand over the factories to the workers. It was perfectly clear and if Emanuele did not understand it he was a complete idiot, if he let his head be turned by Danilo and read Karl Marx. Anna said that perhaps it was not right that they two should possess a soap factory and other people nothing, not even enough to clothe and feed themselves. Giuma got very angry and said it was perfectly right, it was right because his father had built up the soap factory out of nothing at all, before that it had been just a ridiculous kind of shanty and his father had worked all his life to turn it into something big and important. In any case justice is not of this earth, said Giuma, justice is of the kingdom of heaven. And he said that he as a child had believed in the kingdom of heaven, but now he had ceased to believe in it, now it was a thing that only babies believed in. Then Anna asked where justice could be found, if the kingdom of heaven, where it could have been found, did not exist. Giuma said it certainly was a pity not to be able to find it anywhere. However he did not believe in the justice of Karl Marx. And he did not want to go to Danilo’s again, he did not want ever to smell the smell of that room again, he smelt it upon himself, in his clothes, he had them kept out in the air all night long but the smell did not go away. Anna suddenly remembered what Cenzo Rena had said about the peasants in the South, that they ate nothing but beans, and she said that all the same something ought to be done about the peasants in the South. But Giuma told her not to think now about the peasants in the South, he drew her into a quiet corner of the public gardens and they stayed there kissing for a while. Then Giuma wanted to go back to the café where he had been with Danilo, a café on the other side of the river, smoky and dark, Giuma said it was like certain cafés in Paris, if you hid yourself away in there with that old gramophone with a horn and those old prints on the walls you could really believe you were in a café on the Seine.

Anna told Giuma nothing of what she had heard. She was careful to say nothing to him that might displease or provoke him. She pretended to believe all he said to her, she pretended to believe it was because of the smell that he had given up going to see Danilo. She pretended to believe that he did not like the company of his school-fellows because they did not wash properly and were silly, she pretended not to know that they turned their backs on him when he approached. She felt cowardly in relation to Giuma, she had a great fear that he might suddenly get tired of being with her and of kissing her, if she contradicted him over something and they started quarrelling. So she tried never to contradict him and never to quarrel. They no longer talked about justice, they no longer talked about the revolution. But Anna still thought about the revolution when she was alone in her room, she saw a Giuma who had suddenly become different, who mounted the barricades with her and fired shots and sang. These were thoughts that she allowed to grow in secret within her, every day she added a new adventure, the flight of herself and Giuma with guns over the roofs, Fascists whom Danilo and Ippolito had not succeeded in capturing and whom she and Giuma led in chains in front of the people’s tribunal. And she and Giuma, after the barricades, would get married, and they would give the soap factory to the poor. While she was with Giuma these thoughts would dissolve in smoke, she would be deeply ashamed of them and it would seem to her that she would never think them again, but she always thought them again when she got back home and shut herself up in her room, as soon as she sat down at the little table in her room these thoughts blossomed joyous and arrogant inside her.

Signor Sbrancagna asked him whether they ought to take Concettina away to have her baby in some quiet country place, which the war could never reach. Ippolito shrugged his shoulders slightly, he looked at the window and the mountains, they all looked at the mountains and thought of what was going on behind them, women and children running away, tanks advancing and taking the whole of France. It was Danilo who answered Signor Sbrancagna, saying that in a short time there would not be a single quiet place on earth in which to have babies, unless you went to Madagascar. Probably the Germans did not calculate on getting to Madagascar. Then Signora Maria cried that this was not a moment for joking, it had got to be decided where Concettina could go to have her baby, Ippolito must decide, he was the head of the family and he was responsible for Concettina and for the others. Ippolito sat there a little longer with the twisted smile on his face, and then suddenly he got up and they saw him go out of the gate and walk away with the dog on a lead, a cigarette between his lips and his small head bent sideways on to his shoulder.

[...] Giuma knew nothing of the child that was inside her. They lay down and made love in the bushes by the river, and then they were silent with their faces in the grass and Anna hunted for words in which to tell him of the child that was inside her. But she looked at Giuma’s face in the grass and allowed all the words to escape from her. It seemed to her that she had become grown-up since the moment when she realized she was to have a baby, and it seemed to her that he, on the contrary, was still a little boy, with his heat-flushed face and his rumpled hair. He started to complain of how Emanuele would never let him touch the car, he would begin shrieking every time he saw him go near the garage. If they had had the car perhaps they might have been able to go and swim in the lake, it was a tepid, dirty pool but perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad to take a dive into it once in a way. But they couldn’t go there on foot. He himself, in any case, would be leaving in a short time, Mammina had arranged for the villa up above Stresa and in a short time would be coming back to fetch him, she had also arranged for a tutor to give him lessons, in October he was to take his final exams.

[...] She thought how she had neither father nor mother, and how she had found her brother dead on a seat and how she had a baby inside her. But she had not the courage to tell anybody about the baby, nor had she the courage to go and look for a midwife in the town. It seemed to her that she would have courage only for starting a revolution. She ran in despair through the rain. [...]

[...] She said she had not yet thought of how she wanted to spend her life. He asked her how old she was and she said she was sixteen. He said that at sixteen a person ought to begin to know how he wanted to spend his life. She said she wanted to spend her life making a revolution. Then he started laughing heartily, he had small teeth but not like a wolf’s, he had separate, gay little teeth like so many grains of rice. He told her that there was no question of a revolution now.