Florentine Adolescents

THE NAKED STREETS (217 pp.)--I/osco Pratolini--A. A. Wyn ($3).

The Naked Streets is another skillful piece of Italian fiction--and another example of the seemingly endless backlog of Italian writing that finds its belated way to U.S. publication. Vasco Pratolini wrote The Naked Streets in 1943, between chores in the resistance movement, and first published it eight years ago.

It is a tender-tough little story about a gang of kids who grew up, much too fast, in the dirty but lively Santa Croce quarter of Florence. Unlike most of the half-forgotten U.S. proletarian novelists of two decades ago, Pratolini knows how proletarians live, and he writes about them with a tender gravity that is unflecked by condescension or political twisting.

"We liked our quarter," begins Valerio, the studious boy who tells the story. It was, he recalls, a place where everyone scrounged for an extra lira, where the houses rotted with age and children played on the stoops of brothels; yet Valerio and his pals, fired with adolescent hope and vanity, felt that somehow they would find life brighter than their beaten-down parents had managed to.

Suffering and sighing through puppy romances, they took turns loving the lovely Marisa, a girl who was at least as strong on sentiment as she was on sex. It was all very serious, of course, but also a little comic, and Pratolini does a neat job of simultaneously pitying and teasing his adolescents. He also succeeds in capturing the look of young love. "My companion," muses Valerio, "was a girl of 16, with a crown of golden hair, a shining innocent face; she wore green wool gloves and shoes with medium heels and knitted stockings that came to the hem of her coat, where her bare knees peeked out, a little purple from the cold."

Inevitably, the gang fell apart. Gino became a pervert and ended his life in jail. Carlo scrambled off to fight in Ethiopia and died for II Duce. Giorgio, the leader, became an antiFascist; it was he who taught Valerio that life meant more than the flashy nihilism of the Blackshirts.

Like most recent Italian novels, The Naked Streets is skimpy on plot, oversimple in characterization, but redeemed by a strong feeling for the fragile emotions of adolescence. Its true hero is the Santa Croce quarter, which Novelist Pratolini describes with the affectionate accuracy of a man remembering his childhood haunts. Symbol of common miseries and memories, Santa Croce binds the characters together until the troubles of growing up descend upon them, and meanwhile, declares Valerio wistfully, "we were glad to be friends."

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