City life
The events, depicted in the story, take place in a big Italian city. Marcovaldo, the protagonist of the story, is a nature lover and life in the big city is like a torture for him, because there a lot of people, dust and car fumes which break his connection with nature. “This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands”. The imagery of a city where Marcovaldo lives is used for highlighting his personality, he, as a rural man, needs freedom and concrete jungle make him feel blue.
Winter in the house
“Cold has a thousand shapes and a thousand ways of moving in the world: on the sea it gallops like a troop of horses, on the countryside it falls like a swarm of locusts, in the cities like a knife-blade it slashes the streets and penetrates the chinks of unheated houses”. Winter time is the worse time for Marcovaldo and his family because they are poor and don’t have enough money to buy woods. The family, all bundled in overcoats, was watching the embers fade in the stove, and the little clouds rise from their own mouths at every breath. They had stopped talking; the little clouds spoke for them: the wife emitted great long ones like sighs, the children puffed them out like assorted soap-bubbles, and Marcovaldo blew them upwards in jerks, like flashes of genius that promptly vanish. The imagery shows difficulties, the family experience because of lack of money.
A passion for Technicolor films
Except Marcovaldo’s love to the nature, there was one more great love in his life – Technicolor films. He loved it because the wide screen can embrace the most vast horizons: prairies, rocky mountains, equatorial forests, islands” where you live with a garland around your head.” He would see the picture twice, and he never came out until they were closing the theater; and in his thoughts he continued living in those landscapes and breathing those colors. Those films triggered his imagination, making him forget about all the troubles he had and just enjoy the moment of happiness. The imagery depicts Marcovaldo’s one of the favorite activities and the reason why he likes it so much.
Plant in the entrance hall
At his job, among his various other responsibilities, Marcovaldo had to water every morning the potted plant in the entrance hall. It was one of those green house-plants with an erect, thin stalk from which, on both sides, broad, long-stemmed, shiny leaves stick out: in other words, “one of those plants that are so plant-shaped, with leaves so leaf-shaped, that they don't seem real”. Marcovaldo loved the plant and pitied it, he thought that it suffers in this small pot, it leaves become yellow and he had to clear them away, almost crying. This plant became a part of his life “it dominated his thoughts at every hour of the day and night”. The imagery shows the importance of a plant in Marcovaldo’s life.
