In 1922, Bemporad began the ambitious project Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year), inaugurated by Scialle nero (Black Shawl) and La vita nuda (The Naked Life). Each collection includes fifteen short stories and takes its title from the opening story. It is organized according to a thematic criterion, which does not take chronology into account.
Scialle nero edited by Monica Venturini
The short story Scialle nero comes from a 1904 collection, Bianche e nere, from which other texts in this first book published by Bemporad are taken: Prima notte (1900), Il «fumo» (1904), Il tabernacolo (1903), Formalità (1904), Il ventaglino (1903), and Amicissimi (1902). Added to these is a homogeneous group of three short stories, first published in magazines and then in Erba del nostro orto (Milan, Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1915) under the collective title Tonache di Montelusa: Difesa del Mèola (1909), I fortunati (1911), Visto che non piove... (1912).
The canonical number of fifteen texts is completed by a short story from 1894, titled Se..., and four other stories taken directly from magazines:E due! (1901, with the title Strigi), Risposta (1912), Il Pipistrello (January 1920), Rimedio: la Geografia (February 1920, with the title Le parti del mondo).
La vita nuda edited by Francesca Tomassini
Unlike the structure of Scialle nero, the short stories in the subsequent Bemporad volume, La vita nuda, all come from a previous collection with the same title: La vita nuda, published by Treves in 1910. It included seventeen texts that appeared in magazines between 1902 and 1907, eight of which were published in Il Marzocco between February 1904 and August 1907. The selection for the fifteen short stories in the Bemporad collection includes Di guardia (1905) and La cassa riposta (1907), which will be included in the collection L'uomo solo. This is therefore a chronologically rather compact group of short stories, in which the oldest text, dating back to 1902, Il dovere del medico (The Doctor's Duty), appeared in «La Settimana» under the title Il Gancio , which was then changed to its final title when it was included in the 1910 collection and transformed into a one-act play in 1912.
Introduction by Simona Costa
