THE CAPERA
The capera is a girl canter, for the most unmarried and graced, since the youth and the beauty are prejudices for the taste. And a capèra without taste is as a poet without fancy or a novelist without imagination.
The capera almost always calls Luisella, Giovannina, Carmela, she always dresses with a lot of refinement, but particularly its head must be a kind of show, of champion, of model not for the women canters but for those of civil condition.
The remuneration that receives the various capera according to the quality and condition of his/her clients she receives from three carlinis up to thirty carlinis or three plates a month. Some caperas he/she is already seen for the streets of the city with bonnet, gloves and parasol. She recognizes among a group of young women. Here it is, is the tallest, the quickest, the most elegant, its head is the tidied up best, its suits the most elegant its feet the best put on. She always speaks, it knows the facts of everybody, and it is specialized in loving subjects.
The capera is the friend most confiding of the women that have crossed the thirty years, and motive is clear. To this age they start to insinuate in the head of hair you announce in the autumn of the life. Every year that the capèra fà to disappear from the action of birth (to rejuvenate) of his/her clients earns in prestige of it. Its genius consists of knowing how to hide the defects that the age alleges on their heads. Here a gruppetto of silver threads that she makes to disappear, or a rebellious trucioletto that she must put to place. The capera handles everything, here it stuffs, there it removes, there imbruna, down allustra, there swollen, here it deflates, its hands make prodigy; and ten fifteen years disappear under its fingers
THE CLERK
To the shade of the portico that he/she decorates the entry of some of our theaters, her where the spessezza of the pillars offers shelter from the wind and from the rain few men of lean aspect and with niggardly and ragged suits they sit before an old table, that contains some sheet of paper, a dirt calamaio and a small weight that it prevents the few papers to fly away to blow some wind.
These very patient men make him the interpreters of the affections, the angers and the passions of the illiterate. Its style in to write is very simple, it loves the brevity, it never looks for elegant ways to manifest what he/she thinks nearby his, he is clear and original. The clerk also has his/her rate with the price of his/her jobs, starting from the supplication in simple paper up to the volume of one hundred pages, the writing to the spagnuola is the true peak of its art.
The clerk is the interpreter of so many passions, you/he/she is the depositary of other people's throb of the bitterness of the young poor and honorable young girl that owe a lot of times to blush telling his/her own secrets for lack of education
THE SHOESHINER
The pulizza boots with his/her cassette that contains all the utensils for his/her work that you/they consist in various types of brushes, of the polish and black and brown anelina. Its place is almost always near to a coffee where the greatest part of the there are on the clients, they are almost always in two that with their cassettes the customers are divided.
They begin their activity toward the seven of the morning and they stay up to the eight in the evening, and when one gets further for being able him to eat qual thing the other one it stays on the place and it guards the cassette of the other, a lot of times unite him and to the evening they are divided the miserable profit that you/they have done during the day.
When the pulizza boots it is about to the work, he appropriates of your foot, it sets him/it on the wood clog raised again on his/her cassette, before he/she caresses him/it and it removes the mud and the dust of it, it anoints him/it with some his/her mixture, and then it is set to the job of the I rub. Finished to clean a foot, him from a hit of brush on the cassette, and it so silently commands you to abandon on the clog the other foot to proceed to the alike operation. He invites the passers-by saying pulizzamm pulimm; but in the days of rain he looks melancholy the passers-by's shoes without giving his/her invitation making himself/herself/itself account that would be useless.
THE KNIFE SHARPENER
The appearance deceives, and the suit doesn't make the monk, if by chance you thought that that car of the knife sharpener was little thing, as it seems, that prolonged cry, ammola-scissors it was not that a vulgar voice, would deceive you.
What a study, that meditation, that wisdom in that man with his/her modest car! We examine the car of our knife sharpener.
It comes above from the center a wood, to this it is attached a bucket of can, half worn-out and dirty, of form around of a flask, in the neck water introduces him, which falls down, drop to drop, on the edge of the wheel of stone, because of a tubicino that departs from the mean of the bucket, braked by an iron fil.
It passes for the center of the wheel of stone, situated among two vertical principal auctions, an axle iron rotunda, moved by a neighbor carrucoletta, on which a twine winds him, tied up to the great wood wheel. A batten on the astute extremity of the car has moved from a big pulley, that finishes to an iron, I press to few to form of pulley, which makes to turn the axle of the wheel. This way the knife sharpener, shaking with the foot this batten, it turns the principal wheel, and with it, in consequence, the carrucoletta and the wheel of stone.
