Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), Italian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, who was a leader of the verismo (Realist) movement and one of Italy's most influential writers. He was born into a landowning family in Catania, Sicily, and lived in Florence and Milan before returning to Catania. He first wrote fashionable romances; not until he began writing about Sicilian farmers and fishers did his true genius become apparent. In his short stories and in his novels Cavalleria rusticana (1880; trans., with other stories in the same volume, by D. H. Lawrence), I malavoglia (1881; The House by the Medlar Tree, 1890), and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889; trans. 1923), Verga depicted the life and customs of the Sicilian peasantry in a detailed, dramatic, and starkly realistic manner. His verismo style of writing, based on keen observation, strongly influenced the Realist approach of post-World War II writers and film-makers. Verga wrote a stage version of Cavalleria rusticana (produced 1884), which was the basis of Pietro Mascagni's opera (1890). I malavoglia is the source of the film Terra Trema (1948) of Luchino Visconti, a landmark of the Neo-Realist cinema movement.