VERGA, GIOVANNI

(1840–1922)

The greatest exponent of verismo (naturalism) in Italian literature, Giovanni Verga’s exceptional powers of realistic description have led to comparisons with such writers as Emile Zola and D. H. Lawrence. Verga was born in Catania, Sicily, but spent much of his life in Florenceand Milan. Between 1866 and 1881, Verga produced several novels and plays, but with I Malavoglia (The House of the Medlar Tree, 1881) he established himself as a writer of international repute. I Malavoglia is the story of a family of Sicilian fishermen who tempt fate by foolishly speculating on a cargo of lupins. This act of vainglory is the harbinger of a series of disasters that lead the family into misery and dishonor. Verga’s theme, in short, is the pessimistic one of determinism: the inability of human beings to escape the circumstances of their birth. The book inspired Luchino Visconti’s classic neorealist film La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948).

In 1886, Verga published a second novel with a similarly fatalistic theme, Mastro Don Gesualdo, which is the story of a man who is determined to acquire possessions at all costs. He succeeds, but at the end of the novel, despite his daughter’s brilliant marriage, he dies without the family love and affection, which, Verga seems to imply, alone give meaning to life. In the mid-1890s, Verga returned to Catania and worked half-heartedly at a third book, this time set in high society, portraying “the defeated,” but never finished it. Nominated to the Senate in 1920, he died in his ancestral home in Catania in 1922.