Franco Lalli

“Notturno” is a short sequence of lyric poems in Italian, closer to symbolist prose-poetry in tone than to narrative verse. Across ten titled pieces, an “I” speaker meditates on night, desire, and human limitation through dense natural imagery and personification. The arc moves from cosmic seascapes to intimate dawn, tracing a descent from awe to fragile tenderness. In “Nocturne,” the sea is imagined as a fallen giant kneeling, “praying” to a mute sky under lonely stars. “Dreaming” shifts indoors: in houses that “smell of flesh,” men and women sleep like corpses, yet the “white wing” of dream passes over their closed eyes. Erotic intimacy appears in “The Image,” where covering a lover’s pale breasts evokes warm nests and wings that know the blue sky. Several poems stage allegorical dialogues: the Moon answers a fountain jet that she drinks not from it but from “the small veins of the mountains,” and a “child star” falls and is “killed” by the wind, leaving a flower in darkness. Other pieces offer aphoristic reflections on blindness, ambition (“the last rung” leads to vertigo and emptiness), beauty as cold perfection (“the goddess is stone”), and the sovereign “Doubt” wandering with his children “If” and “Perhaps.” The sequence ends at morning with the speaker hovering near a beloved’s cold mouth, sensing violets beginning to sicken and die.

Fireflies (1925), Franco Lalli’s Italian collection in English translation by Giulietta Talamini, is a sequence of brief lyric poems and prose-poems, closer to aphoristic parables than to narrative verse. The pieces move between intimate confession (“I would be but a drop of cool water”) and allegorical scenes in which natural forces and abstractions speak: Wind bargains with Cloud, Darkness questions Wind, two stars gossip about astronomers, and a newborn firefly introduces herself to an elder star. Recurring human figures appear as emblematic types rather than developed characters: the beggar who asks for bread and the poet who begs for a kind word, a gipsy condemned to perpetual wandering, a Capuchin monk counting a day “lost,” nuns pursued by the world they fled, Pierrot asked to stop weeping, and lovers whose sighs rise a “stairway of light” from moon to sea. Central themes are hunger and poverty, eros and longing, the seductions of springtime light, and the inescapability of death, fate, and “Naught.” The overall arc alternates rapture at beauty with moral bitterness and metaphysical dread, ending in stark, cosmic negation.

“Litanies to Satan” is a satirical prose poem framed as a mock-prayer. It opens with a close, sensuous portrait of an unnamed woman as she studies herself at the mirror: her skin is unwrinkled, her makeup revives “the tint of healthy youth,” her eyes shine with adolescent brightness, and her body is slim but dangerously alluring. She dresses with care, admires her reflection, and steps into the street, where men stare, a woman turns to look, and even a passerby exclaims at her beauty. When three modest girls yield her the tram, the speaker addresses Satan directly: “Damn me this woman, ready to damn some poor man.” From there the piece becomes a litany of modern irritations and moral evasions. The narrator begs Satan to remove from his mind a string of overheard clichés—seductive reassurances, melodramatic break-up lines, and movie talk (Clark Gable kissing Myrna Loy). He inserts grotesque news-item humor, wishing that someone pluck and count an unemployed man’s hairs as he counted 8,436 chicken feathers. A rapid catalogue follows—politics, celebrity photos, fashions, stale jokes, Freud, boredom—ending with another newspaper anecdote: an adulterous husband in Denver claims his body strayed while his soul stayed faithful. The speaker asks Satan to watch this “great swindler,” who speaks a liar’s kind of truth.

This text is a sequence of brief lyric poems and aphoristic prose-poems, built from surreal vignettes and moral-paradoxical images rather than a single plot. It opens with an old poor man who falls asleep on the threshold of a cemetery, prompting Death to angrily order the gates shut. Other scenes echo physical lack as spiritual condition: in an empty square a broken, dry fountain “asks for a little wind” because it is dying of thirst; the sea lies silent in its vast coffin under a motionless “tomb of stars.” A first-person speaker alternates between sudden surges of youthful vitality and the recognition that he is not different from the beggar at the street corner: the beggar asks for bread, the speaker begs for a word—both want to live. The poems question God’s harsh design, in which humans crave bread more than sun, wine more than water, shadow more than light. Restless striving is likened to blind people trampling a coin meant for them; the “Vagabond” is urged to stop and realize the most beautiful road circles the poor home once left. Recurring figures—the Cross, the Wind searching for Silence, lovers’ sighs climbing a moonlit ladder—lead to an existential climax: a “ferocious cross” called Nothingness on which Everything is nailed. The sequence ends inwardly, with a wingless black swallow of Pain nesting in the hidden heart.

Franco Lalli’s “Preghiera del mattino” and “Preghiera della sera” are devotional lyric prose pieces structured as two prayers that frame a single day. The genre is religious meditation, written in the first person as a direct address to God. In the morning prayer, the speaker thanks God for a “new blank page” in the book of his life and asks for guidance to write the day’s story without mistakes. He requests that Work and Duty be cheerful companions and that Hope follow him like a child follows its mother. Central themes are moral self-discipline and compassion: he asks to be restrained from harming anyone, lying, or betraying, and to be kept from Doubt and Hatred, as well as from favors offered by mercenaries and flattery from the corrupt. He prays to recognize and help the poor, afflicted, sick, and lost, and to accept annoyances, disappointments, and bitterness with courage and dignity, suffering alone rather than causing others to suffer. The evening prayer completes the arc with gratitude for protection, honest hands, a pure heart, family joy (children and a faithful partner), and signs of God perceived in everyday encounters: a woman making the sign of the cross, a boy playing, a beggar’s voice, and his own silent response to an insult. Though materially unrewarding, the day is affirmed as spiritually rich, ending with a plea for forgiveness and peaceful rest.

“Una foglia di rosa” is a lyrical, symbolist short prose tale framed as a memoir. The unnamed narrator, an eighteen-year-old aspiring poet, recalls Arnaldo Montana, a fifty-six-year-old former philosophy professor and scholar of Dante and medieval mysticism, marked by illness, solitude, and a commanding, unsmiling gaze. The narrator first sees him delivering a fiery public speech, then later visits him with a notebook of poems, hoping for approval. Montana reads in silence and dismisses the verses harshly, telling the youth he should study grammar instead of writing love poems, accusing him of ambition and “anemic” nostalgia. The rebuff crushes the narrator, yet months later Montana unexpectedly befriends him, inviting him into his cluttered rooms and becoming a rigorous mentor. Through evening walks and conversations, Montana voices a biting but not hateful pessimism about humanity, while showing tenderness toward children and animals, illustrated by an anecdote in which a horse safely guides a carriage when the drunken driver collapses. He finally confides the core wound of his life: an unfulfilled love for Anna, a noble girl he tutored, whom he could not marry because of age and class; their plan to flee was discovered, and he never saw her again. Montana dies of paralysis with the narrator at his bedside. A wind-blown rose petal lands on the dead man’s mouth, and it closes as if smiling for the first time. In an epilogue, an old woman named Anna tells grandchildren a “fairy tale” that is her own story, ending with the question of which petal brought life, love, or death.

Franco Lalli’s Il figlio di Enrico Scatena is a serialized social melodrama with elements of political thriller and murder mystery, set between small-town Springfield and New York. Enrico Scatena, an Italian immigrant who rose from poverty to wealth through construction and civic influence, dreams of turning his weekly paper, The Springfield News, into a daily and installing his only son Paolo, a Columbia journalism student, as editor—partly to keep him from being “stolen” by New York. At a triumphal banquet Enrico delivers a vehement anti-communist speech and offers $5,000 to anyone who can identify a communist in Springfield. The prize claim detonates his life: evidence shows the communist is Paolo. Enrico, bound by honor, pays the money secretly to the parish priest, Don Carlo, but a key witness, artist John Reed, disappears and is later found shot dead near Springfield. Enrico confronts Paolo in New York; Paolo defiantly embraces communism, resenting a life already “won” by his father, and reveals the influence of Doris Mitchell, his lover. Crushed, Enrico gives away his fortune and withdraws from public life. Don Carlo travels to New York to understand Paolo and deliver a message from Sandra, Paolo’s neglected fiancée. There Doris, terrified, confesses she is a Russian spy using her art shop as a cover and is being threatened, and she seeks the priest’s counsel (the text then breaks off).

“The Dream” is a short psychological-fantastic tale with symbolic, allegorical imagery. An unnamed office worker receives a telegram from his sister: “Mother dying. Come at once.” He cannot catch the evening connections to his mountain village, so he plans to leave at 6:30 a.m., convinced his mother is already dead. Exhausted by anxiety, he falls into a deep sleep and has an overwhelming dream: he leads a silent procession of hooded monks across an immense yellow desert, each carrying a towering metal cross. The march feels endless; thirst becomes a collective torment, and Death seems to stalk them. At sunset they reach the Sphinx’s colossal house. He begs the mute Sphinx for water, then rages and is trapped behind an iron door, waking in terror at dawn. But the dream does not release him. Awake, he still believes he must send water to the desert, then becomes fixated on acquiring a robe and cross. His harmless “madness,” as doctors would call it, lasts five years: he lives as a vagrant, staging nocturnal marches with an imaginary army. One night the same dream returns. This time the Sphinx points to a hidden door: inside a coffin lies his mother, who rises and gives him water. He wakes at dawn in a different, filthy room, beside a cross, confused by lost time as a bell rings. Themes include grief, guilt, delirium, and the mind’s porous boundary between dream and life.

This text is a magazine-style miscellany (feuilleton/journalistic prose with satirical and essayistic sketches) written in Italian and set largely in postwar New York. It opens with a comic allegory: on 29 December 1948 the readers of the Italian-language magazine “Divagando” are imagined as a rain-soaked procession of subscribers, writers, and even furniture packed into crates, as the editorial office relocates from the Rockefeller Center “honeycombs” to a smaller house near Times Square (166 West 48th Street). Named staffers (Elisa Odabella, Maria Crocetti, Mario Ruggeri, Ugo Altalena) finish packing and sorting old letters. The piece then shifts to polemic and cultural commentary. In “Popov contro Marconi,” Lalli recounts Marconi’s biography and achievements only to denounce, with irony, a Soviet decree claiming the invention of wireless telegraphy for the Russian scientist Aleksandr Popov; the broader theme is propaganda’s “theft” of historical glory. “Scenario” offers a social portrait of New York’s Bowery “bums,” classifying three types and ending with a lyrical scene of them watching sunsets at Battery Place. A long “Taccuino” continues in brief vignettes: Father Divine’s movement, the 1947 blizzard paralyzing the city, consumerism and advertising, changing food prices, film gossip (Magnani/Rossellini/Bergman), jokes about dictators, and reflections on modern haste, memory, and immigrant life. The overall arc moves from a local office move to an expansive, ironic notebook of mid-century urban and political life.

“The Seller of Dreams” is a fantastical, ironic short prose tale narrated in the first person by Roberto, an Italian-speaking man living with Jane in New York. It blends fable, urban fantasy, and philosophical satire. The plot begins with Jane waking Roberto on successive mornings to recount vivid dreams. One dream imagines a “Country of Soulmates” where men and women are born with matching numbers on their lower backs, allowing destined pairs to find each other like standardized parts. Another dream takes place in a “Cemetery of Images,” a room of mirrors holding the “dead” former faces a person has worn through life; when Jane asks to see Roberto’s images, an old woman replies, “Who is Roberto?”, and Jane wakes. After a week of such accounts, Jane confesses the dreams are not hers: she buys them, stored in small jewel-like boxes. She leads Roberto to a dim shop in an old quarter, where the elderly Mastro Bernardo politely claims he manufactures dreams “for the theatre of the poor,” while the rich live their dreams in reality. Jane explains the boxes are marked by hearts for women and wings for men. Roberto buys one, walks home anxious and half-ridiculous, then rationalizes that the “miracle” is suggestion: in modern life, everyone sells dreams—books, promotions, even stocks.

“La fine dell’Imperatrice Folle” is a lyrical historical-biographical sketch, written as a mournful meditation on how collective memory can “kill” the living by forgetting them. Franco Lalli frames the Habsburg circle as a vanished world that occasionally resurfaces only to play its last tragic act, then disappears again. The narrative focuses on Princess Charlotte of Belgium (Carlotta), daughter of King Leopold I, who marries Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1857. Their politically arranged union quickly becomes a genuine love match, and the early scenes at Miramare emphasize youth, beauty, festivity, and the illusion of lasting happiness. That happiness collapses under dynastic rivalry and international intrigue. Emperor Franz Joseph, fearing his brother as a rival, helps push Maximilian toward Napoleon III’s plan to install a monarchy in Mexico. Encouraged by Charlotte’s ambition for a court, the couple accepts the crown, but Mexico treats them as foreigners and Benito Juárez’s republican forces resist. Charlotte returns to Europe to beg Napoleon III, the Austrian emperor, and finally the Pope for aid; rejected and exhausted, she begins to lose her sanity. After Maximilian is captured and executed at Querétaro (1867), she fully breaks down at age 27 and lives for sixty years in secluded confinement, fixated on relics and a mannequin of her husband, until her death at Bouchout—peace arriving only with oblivion.

“The Man Who No Longer Wanted to Die” is a satirical, metafictional novella narrated by a self-conscious storyteller who repeatedly comments on his own digressions and even stages interruptions from “bored readers.” The tale centers on three figures: Andrea Pier Luigi Valeri, a timid, mediocre forty-year-old bachelor from the petty bourgeoisie; Nanette Nanò, a modest, pianistic young woman from a well-off provincial family in the town of Chessoio; and an unnamed man bent on suicide. After Nanette’s father dies (Death appears as an unexpected visitor who “comes by itself”), Andrea begins courting Nanette, entranced by her respectability and her sentimental piano pieces. Their routine visits lead to a quiet engagement, symbolized by Nanette sewing an idealized trousseau and by Andrea ordering an expensive, fashionable ash-colored suit for the formal betrothal—an emblem of his vanity and desire to rise socially. On the morning of the ceremony Andrea encounters a desperate man about to jump from a bridge. He tackles him to prevent the suicide, but their struggle ruins Andrea’s new suit with mud. Overcome by rage and humiliation, Andrea abruptly reverses roles: he lifts the man—now begging to live—and throws him into the river, then stays behind adjusting his trousers. Themes include bourgeois emptiness, the cruelty beneath propriety, and death treated with grotesque irony.

This nonfiction, essayistic travel sketch (framed as advice to a “you” arriving in New York) describes where to find calm in the city after sunset. The first refuge is the bridges, presented as the only places that still preserve “a certain composure,” protected from the crush of crowds and allowing the “rhythmic movement of a walk,” even with cars passing. The narrator inventories New York’s many bridges and lingers on two: the Brooklyn Bridge, celebrated by postcards, popular serial novels, and poets as a symbol of American dynamism, and lovingly painted in many lights by the artist Peppino Stella. Its grandeur is shadowed by a grim origin story: the chief engineer dies of tetanus after a fall; his son, who continues the work, is paralyzed and directs construction from his window; six days after the 1883 opening, a woman falls on the steps, panic spreads, and twelve people die in the stampede. The George Washington Bridge is then rendered as a gigantic silver arc over the Hudson, making pedestrians feel like ants and airplanes like flies. After bridges, the narrator recommends churches and nearby convent retreats as crowded sanctuaries from modern noise (radio, phonograph, telephone, television), noting landmarks including St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the shrine of Italian immigrant saint Francesca Cabrini, before briefly listing theaters, clubs, sports, and concert halls as other evening choices.

Franco Lalli’s text is an epistolary, reflective narrative that blends autobiographical confession with spiritual apologue. In a series of letters addressed to a friend, George, the unnamed narrator explains a sudden inner change that George has noticed: he has become indifferent, withdrawn, and evasive in social life. The turning point occurs one ordinary September evening when, watching night fall from a window, he feels an inexplicable “white, cold emptiness,” as if “something inside me had died.” Medical and psychiatric consultations find no physical illness, offering vague diagnoses (“a nervous matter,” “mild exhaustion”), which leads the narrator to criticize modern science for understanding machines and astronomy but not the human spirit. After two months he identifies the real cause: he is “a man without dreams”; the ambitions and illusions that once animated him have abruptly vanished, making all human striving seem ridiculous and sad. The narrative arc then reverses when he discovers an old black-bound booklet given by his father before his departure for America. He finally reads it obsessively, rereads it, and experiences peace, joy, and a “new, nobler” meaning in life as the emptiness disappears. Later letters reveal the booklet to be the Gospel, portrayed as a unique book that transforms history and remakes the reader, prompting a decisive break with his past and a new faith.

“Lettera da New York” is a journalistic feuilleton/epistolary column composed of short, loosely connected vignettes that sketch mid-century American public life with irony. The narrator opens by noting a 20th Century-Fox film advertised as “ten percent true and ninety percent invented,” treating even a small fraction of truth as rare and reassuring. He then reports on a major medical congress in New York, emphasizing the growing presence of women physicians and quoting their claim that men confide certain things only to women. An elderly observer counters with a proverb-like diagnosis: the best doctors are Diet, Cheerfulness, and Money, later adding Time. A darker anecdote follows: the wrestler Frank Leavitt, nicknamed “the devil-man” and famed for thousands of bouts, dies at 63 after a varied life (soldier, football player, film actor, political errand-runner). After disqualification and retirement he briefly tries politics, but flees, calling it a “witch” harsher than combat. The column then surveys public anxieties and cultural economics: relentless rain blamed by citizens on atomic tests; Broadway’s financial crisis, with costly flops by Moss Hart and Tennessee Williams and critics predicting a turn from realism toward subjective psychological drama. It closes with two comic notes: a divorcee whose maiden name becomes Miss Cork, and Presbyterians rejecting a proposal to change the Lord’s Prayer from “debts” to “sins.”

“MARGINI” is a modernist, lyrical-prose sequence in which a first-person narrator records urban impressions and turns them into philosophical parables. In a café’s shadowed corner he watches scattered figures: a shabby painter with a serious, doll-like fifteen-year-old girl; a worn, ambiguous woman reading an outdated newspaper; an ill-matched couple whose tenderness and brutishness clash; four little old men, one blind; and an older lady savoring a cup of whipped cream with a secret, childlike joy. Trying to recover that lost happiness, the narrator orders the same dessert, but feels only heaviness and sadness, realizing adulthood cannot be consoled so easily. The piece then shifts to a recurring vision of sameness in the city (Broadway, the Bronx, Brooklyn): the narrator keeps recognizing the same noses, moustaches, and moles. At the theater he discovers why: a “triumphal” parade is staged by the same four exhausted extras looping on and off, prompting his conclusion that the world reuses a few types. Further vignettes question time—clocks give conflicting “opinions,” tempting him with imagined youth—before turning to love, experienced as artificial (“perfume that tastes of bottle”). He plans to mock romantic shadows by keeping a parrot trained to shout “Amore,” and ends by personifying love as attended by two pages: one fiery, intoxicating passion and one dull, weary disenchantment.

Franco Lalli’s New York—Diario di un Reporter is a literary journalistic diary: dated, scene-by-scene reportage from 1930s New York, written in Italian with aphoristic, satirical commentary. The narrator, an Italian reporter, records vignettes rather than a continuous plot, moving through restaurants, trams and subways, churches, Wall Street, cinemas, hotels, banks, dance halls, and city squares. Recurring themes are modern mass life, speed, consumerism, money as a quasi-religion, and the city as theatrical spectacle. A Rockefeller Center engineer, Reinhard, provocatively claims America’s “secret strength” is that Americans “don’t know how to eat,” so they avoid the lethargy of long meals and keep producing. The diary contrasts wealth and poverty: a man in a tram survives the Depression by sending his wife away, placing a child in charity, killing the cat, and living on city relief; the fall of financier William Durant becomes a moral parable. Lalli visits figures such as columnist Arthur Brisbane (who defines a newspaper as the second hand of history), Italian-American promoters and artisans, and observes street politics in “red” Union Square. Moments of quiet (a signed Mass for the deaf) alternate with nightlife, prostitution, advertising schemes, and constant numerical “facts,” ending in an ambivalent portrait of a city both ingenious and rootless.

This is Franco Lalli's personal notebook—his actual taccuino, the same word that titles his newspaper column ("Taccuino di Franco Lalli")—kept around 1940. Handwritten in Italian, it gathers private meditations rather than finished work: prose-poems, spiritual reflection, and pointed cultural commentary set down as they came to him. Much of it circles Saint Francis of Assisi, evoked through emblematic episodes—San Damiano, the break with his father, the meeting with the Sultan of Egypt, the ecstasy of La Verna—and through his communion with creatures (he speaks even to the ants), amid a mystical nature of "holy air" and a velvet sky strewn with trembling golden lilies. One passage dates its composition to a deserted beach near Rome in the summer of 1939, and records that the fascist secret police were opening his correspondence—surveillance that likely dates to his years with La Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin. From there the notebook turns polemical, arguing that modern "pagan" despair springs from abandoning the life of the Spirit—religion, philosophy, moral principle—for machines and mass propaganda, and calling instead for a "propaganda of the Spirit" carried by artists and a renewed religious language. It closes on aphorisms about freedom, conscience, and peace as inner states, threaded with recurring pastoral images of wind, snow, shepherds, and the poor who sleep more peacefully than kings.

“La ragione dei Senza ragione” is a psychological short story framed as a first-person visit to an isolated Swiss “hotel for neurasthenics,” essentially a genteel asylum. The narrator arrives with the Director and is introduced to residents whose fixations are presented with eerie clarity. One patient, a polished former violinist, is driven nearly insane by creaking noises; he claims to have fired a revolver at a mouse to stop the sound. In the reading room the narrator meets Olindo, a self-styled marquis who compulsively counts and catalogues everything, distrusts poets, fears the number thirteen, and plans to change his name, even threatening suicide if others refuse to accept it. The corridor offers more grotesque portraits: a white-bearded man who insists he is the Pope, and other eccentrics glimpsed behind doors. Olindo leads the narrator to “the Astronomer,” a gaunt man who has constructed a tin “telescope” and speaks with chilling, rigorous logic. He confesses that he killed his beautiful lover at the moment he felt absolute possession, claiming murder preserves love from time’s decay by making the beloved eternal. Now he scans the night sky to find her transformed into a star, dreaming of stealing that star back. The story ends with the narrator’s lasting memory of this sealed-off world where private obsessions replace reason.

“Salotti – Adventure in a Single Time” is a one-act salon drama built almost entirely from witty, charged dialogue. It opens with an extended stage description of an opulent third-floor drawing room overlooking a spring garden, windows open to swallows and evening air, with perfume lingering and objects (mirror, silk sofas, leopard skin) emphasizing decadent luxury. The only characters are “Lei,” a beautiful, self-possessed Countess, and “Lui,” a Duke who is also a poet and seasoned seducer. They begin with cynical generalizations—she dismisses men as distributors of ready-made sweet words, he reduces women to dangerous dolls—then slide into a flirtation shaped by pride and mistrust. The Duke admits he has courted her for seven months and feels in her an unsettling “spell” that turns desire into fear. The Countess parries with irony, warning him against compromising gestures, and invokes her marriage and the threat of scandal as reasons to resist. As twilight deepens, the Duke demands sincerity, denounces their social “masks,” and argues for wasting life joyfully rather than dutifully. The emotional pressure culminates when he insists on naming what the wind gathers from happy mouths; the Countess, pale, finally utters the word she has withheld: “Love.” The text ends “New York,” marking its place of composition.

“Sotto l’ombrello” is a lyrical, modernist-tinged novella centered on Severino Madera (called Rino by friends, “Se” by women), a 26-year-old Italian man of private means who has drifted through the world like an exile, seeking freedom and novelty but increasingly afflicted by an unnamed inner sickness: boredom, loneliness, and a corrosive melancholy. Having rejected study and conventional life, he spends his youth on travel and casual seductions, treating women as the last remaining passion capable of briefly lifting his despair. One rainy autumn evening in a large city, he impulsively approaches a petite, elegant young woman and offers to share his umbrella. Their flirtation quickly turns intimate as they walk through the crowd, trading evasions and half-confessions; he speaks as if already in love, and she responds with teasing reserve behind her veil. They remain together for four days, apparently in a mixture of sensuality and tenderness, before she suddenly leaves by train without a true farewell. He is left with only a hairpin and a delicate handkerchief marked with a single embroidered initial. Years later, now old and isolated in a castle, Severino lives on memory. The lost woman becomes the defining color of his youth, and the story closes with a meditation on love as unattainable desire, intensified by absence and never truly possessed.

This excerpt is from a metropolitan social novel with satiric, lyrical passages about modern life and the press, set in interwar New York (the text labels 1925, though later references suggest the early 1930s). It opens in the New York Globe newsroom, where editors and reporters convert suicides, vice raids, and scandals into “Extra!” editions, capturing the speed and cynicism of tabloid production. The central character, Robert “Bob” Davis, is a talented but spiritually exhausted reporter who despises the ephemerality of news and drifts through affairs, including a routine liaison with Helen. Seeking a cure for boredom and unbelief, Bob visits Dr. Leonard, an elderly physician-philosopher who urges him to work and have faith. Bob resolves to “write a book” but is derailed by addiction and anxiety, dramatized in an extended attempt to quit smoking that ends in relapse. A parallel social world enters through Madame Paula Dixon, a wealthy hostess who replaces lovers by staging lavish parties. At one such party Bob meets an unnamed, striking woman later identified as Doris Foster. Their late-night conversation about solitude and restraint ends with her refusing further contact. A theft and ensuing publicity keep the night alive in Bob’s mind; a month later he unexpectedly meets Doris at a dog show, and they cautiously arrange to see each other again.

“Gli Spiriti in Casa” is a six-episode Italian-language radio comedy serial (broadcast in New York in 1947 within the sponsored program “Ridi che ti Passa,” literally “Laugh and it will pass”). It mixes domestic farce with supernatural parody and is framed by advertising breaks. Episode 1 introduces Francesco Trippa and his wife Assunta, celebrated in their town as a perfectly harmonious couple after twenty-five years of marriage. Their affectionate banter, gifts, and cooking (notably artichokes with ham) establish an ideal of marital peace. A visiting friend, “the Professor,” reveals he is a medium who can communicate with the dead, planting comic anxiety. Five years later (Episodes 2–5), Assunta has died and Francesco has remarried Elvira, a more quarrelsome widow. When the Professor conducts a séance, Francesco alone can hear and see Assunta’s spirit, who returns jealous and vindictive, worsening the new marriage. A second séance makes Elvira see her own dead husband, Asdrubale, who accuses her of complicity in his poisoning and threatens violence. The spirits’ harassment escalates into chaos, and the Professor abandons them. Episode 6 resolves the plot with a twist: the haunting was Francesco’s nightmare prompted by the earlier conversation about spirits. He wakes beside a living Assunta, reaffirming fidelity and restoring the original marital idyll.

Il morto sta bene is a stage comedy by Italian-American writer Franco Lalli, set in three interiors (kitchen, business office, living room) and built around suspicion, deception, and marital betrayal. The main characters are Sandro, a 55-year-old businessman; Lucia, his wife; Armando, Sandro’s business partner; and “the Pharmacist,” identified as Don Bartolo, an older, fussy, self-important man. In Part One, Lucia furtively pours a white powder into Sandro’s tomato juice. Sandro pretends to read the newspaper but watches her closely, refuses to drink, and leaves. Alone, Lucia dumps the drink, reinforcing the appearance that she is trying to poison him. At the office, Sandro confides in Armando that his life is in danger: he believes Lucia is having an affair with Don Bartolo and that the mysterious “little powder” in pharmacy-style packets is intended to kill him. Sandro admits he has been pretending to drink the juice and discarding it. Armando proposes a trap: Sandro should “die without dying,” staging his suicide so Lucia and Don Bartolo will reveal themselves through their reactions and plans. Sandro returns home, hints he will leave “for the other world,” theatrically takes the tomato juice with him, and exits as Lucia watches in alarm. Part Two begins in the living room with Don Bartolo’s absurd, pedantic monologue, signaling a satirical turn toward the fallout of Sandro’s staged death.

La Fuga is a realist one-act stage drama (presented in several parts and scenes) centered on two struggling performers who try to escape their past. Paolo, an actor in his forties with a history of gambling, debt, and arrests, lives in a sparsely furnished Springfield apartment with Flora del Val, a young singer who now gives modest voice lessons. Flora insists they left Chicago to redeem themselves after a spiritual “crisis,” but Paolo feels trapped by poverty and monotony and suspects her motives include jealousy and possessiveness. Their only domestic comfort is a caged canary, Trill, which, like them, no longer sings. The plot turns when Carlo Corelli, a theatrical impresario, appears and offers Paolo a place in a new “first-rate” Chicago company. Paolo seizes the chance and flees without waiting for Flora. On the Chicago stage, amid rehearsal chaos, Paolo reunites with Barbara Rivoli, only to learn she is married. Immediately after, a police agent arrests Paolo; he is accused of a serious crime and held on high bail, with “strong circumstantial evidence,” including an unpaid debt to the victim. Paolo’s only defense is an alibi: he was in Springfield with Flora. Back in Springfield, Flora loses her students, despairs, prepares to return to Chicago, and releases Trill. An адвocate arrives to verify the alibi and is revealed to be Flora’s father; he asks forgiveness, recognizes her resolve to change, and proposes they go together—adding that Paolo is still waiting for her.

“Le Pantofole di Capo d’Anno” is a domestic comic drama (written like a radio or stage play) about retirement, family dependence, and the fragile stability of marriage. Giovanni, about sixty, celebrates with his friend Michele that after decades of struggle he can finally “mettersi in pantofole” (put on slippers), which he treats as a symbol of duty fulfilled and deserved rest. He is proud that his daughters are married and living far away, while his wife Giulia cannot accept the distance and anxiously monitors their letters. The calm collapses when Teresa arrives unexpectedly with a suitcase and admits she has left her husband, unable to bear isolation and incompatibility. Giulia immediately validates her, and, after calling the second daughter Carolina, announces that Carolina will also leave her husband. Giovanni, furious that his hard-won peace is ruined, shouts “Addio pantofole!” and puts his shoes back on, moving into a modest furnished room. In Part Two, Giovanni resists Teresa’s plea to return home and declares “guerra ad oltranza” (war to the bitter end). The reversal comes when Giulia, now alone because both daughters have returned to their husbands, also takes a room in the same boarding house. She begs Giovanni to come home, revealing she has prepared gold-embroidered New Year’s slippers for him. Softened, he agrees, and they leave together to retrieve the slippers.

“Only the Woman Knows” is a short domestic stage play (comic-satirical drama) set in a typical American middle-class living room, where telephones and offstage voices suggest later interruptions and social pressure. The central couple are Alfred Reade, about fifty, and his wife Martha Lawson Reade, about forty. The play opens with exaggerated marital tenderness: Alfred surprises Martha with earrings and celebrates their “fateful” Wednesdays, then proudly announces that a newspaper has chosen them as the city’s “ideal couple” and will honor them at a public dinner. He plans a speech comparing marriage to a carriage pulled by two horses and claims the secret of happiness is “merely the woman,” prompting Martha to rehearse dutiful wifely virtues (love, fidelity, respect, consolation, good meals). The tone shifts when Mr. Brush, a lawyer, arrives with startling news: Martha has been left $50,000 by a California man, James Norton, with the stipulation that she forgive him and have a monthly mass said for him. Martha insists she has never heard the name, but Alfred immediately suspects a hidden connection, and the gift begins to corrode the couple’s carefully performed harmony. The truncated ending points toward escalating mistrust and the exposure of a past that Martha may alone understand.

“The North Star” is a short dramatic script with expressionistic stage directions and an allegorical frame. A young “Traveler” arrives in a moonlike avenue at a gate guarded by two Angels who write in enormous books. They tell him he may enter only after visiting a nearby house and choosing a single memory to keep forever; his “soul” will make the choice. Inside, a hall lined with mirrors begins to replay scenes from his life, turning the memory-selection into a retrospective of identity. The mirrored episodes present the Traveler as a Polish pianist-composer who moves through early loss and artistic fame: his sister Emily dies of tuberculosis in Warsaw (1822), and as a nineteen-year-old he triumphs at a Vienna concert (1829) while longing for his absent parents. In Paris he meets musical and aristocratic figures including Rossini, Prince Radziwill, the Rothschild circle, and Franz Liszt. George Sand names him her “North Star” and draws him into an intense, controversial relationship. Parallel scenes show the loyal admiration of Jane Stirling, contrasted with Sand’s magnetic, destructive pull, discussed bitterly by Liszt and Stirling. The arc ends with Sand proposing they flee together to Majorca, escalating gossip into deliberate scandal, and pushing the Traveler further into exile, longing, and dependence on love and art.