Unlike the structure of Scialle nero, the short stories in Bemporad's subsequent volume, La vita nuda, all come from a previous collection of the same title: La vita nuda, published by Treves in 1910. It is a group of short stories that are chronologically quite compact. Betrayal, or rather the primary fact underlying the narrative structure of a fundamental short story such as Il dovere del medico, is the connecting thread between several texts in this second Bemporad collection, which opens, as usual, with an eponymous short story. In any case, decomposition, a mechanism peculiar to humorous reflection, presides over the depiction of ‘naked life’ just as it had been central to the stories in Scialle nero.
