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The narrative interweaves episodes from urban life in Naples, following families, tradespeople, and local notables as luck, faith, and social pressure alter their fortunes. Set pieces include a public lottery drawing, a christening, carnival scenes, visions and a reported miracle, a medium's imprisonment, bankruptcy, lawsuits and a duel. Recurring themes are superstition, economic precarity, communal ritual, and the collision of private desires with public judgment, with several personal relationships and legal entanglements illustrating how hope and hardship shape everyday existence.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. The trend in the original book was to hyphenate compound words. Therefore the hyphenated variant was chosen in most of the cases.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.