Between June 1944 and April 1945, a refugee in a family home in the lower Friuli, Satta wrote these pages, full of sarcasm and bitterness deep in the attempt to retrace some of the hidden reasons of the paradoxical atrocious 20 last years of the Italian history. And once he had two inevitable questions: why the Italians had accepted, and the vast majority argued, fascism? And why, once pushed into the war, these same Italians had been hoped in defeat? More than on that filthy handful of true fascists, occasional and brutal actors, but always accompanied by a "trail of ridiculous," the Satta's eye is fixed on the figure of  the "traditional man", the average citizen of nineteenth-century tradition, attached to freedom only as a "guarantee of privilege": it was he who had been transferred to Fascism his freedom, he had jumped to dream the impossible rebuilding of an old order that once again could reassure him. This is the harsh, bleak vision Satta presents: crossed from continuous, and sometimes unpleasant harshness, it is supported by a great black moralist vein, as well as the painful dryness of the narrator later revealed with Il Giorno del giudizio.