This lovely vignette of a typical moment is significant precisely because it is typical. It presents, on a small scale, a moment of violence and passion dissolving into the unchanged immensity of nature, a tiny comment on the futility lurking to swallow all human struggle. Teresa's "impressive pause" seems almost to be calling Giorgio's attention to the message in the immensity of the plain.

This plain, or Campo, is symbolic of the eternally downtrodden laborers of the field, the peons and peasantry (as will become clear in Chapter 1-7). If it is "half the world," it is decidedly the lower half. Invoking it against Giorgio's "passion" serves to comment on the failure of the Republican ideal.