Giovanni Verga and Verismo: Life, Works and Key Traits

A life between Sicily and the mainland

Giovanni Verga was born in Catania on 2 September 1840, the son of landowner Giovanni Battista Verga. He studied law at the University of Catania between 1860 and 1865, after a private education in the years before. He then moved to Florence, where he lived from 1865 to 1870, and finally to Milan, where he stayed until 1885: these were the years in which he matured as a writer and formed the most important friendship of his life, with Luigi Capuana.

Back in Sicily, Verga was appointed senator of the Kingdom in 1920. He died in Catania on 27 January 1922, in the house where he was born, on Via Sant’Anna, of a cerebral thrombosis.

The early years and the Milan period

Verga’s first novels, written when he was very young, remain minor works: Amore e patria (1856-57), identified by the Treccani Dizionario Biografico as his first novel, and I carbonari della montagna (1861-62), published at the author’s own expense. Una peccatrice followed in 1866, written in Florence, along with the epistolary novel Storia di una capinera (1870-71). Eva (1873) marks, according to Treccani, the real turning point toward Verga’s mature fiction. That same year, 1875, produced Tigre reale and Eros, works tied to the Milanese Scapigliatura movement, which, per the English Wikipedia, set the false, cynical life of the urban upper classes against the virtues of family life.

At the end of 1877, the Sicilian writer and critic Luigi Capuana settled in Milan and became, from that point on, Verga’s closest friend. Both men were struck by L’Assommoir, the novel Émile Zola published that same year, and decided to take it as a model for their own narrative project.

What Verismo is

Verismo is the Italian literary movement that, between 1875 and the early 1900s, portrayed post-unification Italy through a method rooted in the era’s positivist climate, a broad faith in science, empirical observation and research. Its name comes from the Italian word for “true.” Three Sicilian writers are credited as its leading figures: Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana (author of Giacinta, considered the movement’s manifesto novel) and Federico De Roberto; other names linked to the movement include Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda and, in one phase of his career, Gabriele D’Annunzio.

The movement rests on four core principles: an impersonal form of narration; language and style suited to the subject at hand; a study of modern Italy across all its social classes; and a method built on environmental analysis, modelled on scientific inquiry. The Recap on the industrial revolution covers the economic and social upheaval that forms the backdrop to Verismo’s stories of rural poverty. Treccani’s biography describes Verga’s project as a search for “the new prose of a unified Italy,” pursued through a realistic study of Sicily, a world the source describes as worse off, if anything, after unification.

Verismo versus French Naturalism

Verga’s debt to Zola is well documented: L’Assommoir was adopted as a model in 1877. But what grew out of it took a different direction from French Naturalism. Verga and Capuana rejected the scientific claims and the social purpose that Zola’s movement asserted for itself, put more weight on the craft of the writing, and chose rural, provincial life over the big-city working-class settings of Naturalism.

A closer look: the preface letter to L’amante di Gramigna is, according to the Treccani Dizionario Biografico, the text of central importance for Verga’s theory of impersonality: it is where he explains why the narrator’s voice has to stay out of the story.

Impersonality and free indirect discourse

Impersonality is the technique underpinning Verga’s mature fiction: the author vanishes, and the story appears to tell itself through the characters’ own point of view. To achieve it, Verga worked the language on two levels. On one, he adopted free indirect discourse, built from long, winding sentences, sparse and irregular punctuation, and coordination that Treccani calls “alogical,” detached from the logic of formal written prose. On the other, he made the syntax itself dialectal, borrowing the loose, irrational connectives of spoken language, the famous run-on “che” clauses that mark his best-known pages: the goal, according to Encyclopedia.com, was an “invisible author,” achieved by blending written language with spoken dialect.

The result is a choral narration, one that adopts the point of view of the community of fishermen and peasants whose stories it tells, instead of that of an outside, all-knowing narrator. This same attention to spoken syntax is the thread picked up in the Recap on Italian dialects, on how oral language finds its way onto the page. A reader following two fishermen talking in I Malavoglia, or watching a peasant family fall apart, never finds a moral aside steering the interpretation: whatever judgement exists rises out of the facts themselves.

The Cycle of the Vanquished, a project left unfinished

On 21 April 1878, Verga announced a narrative project he called La marea, later renamed the Cycle of the Vanquished. The planned series comprised five novels: I Malavoglia, Mastro-don Gesualdo, La duchessa delle Gargantas, L’onorevole Scipioni and L’uomo di lusso. Of these, Verga completed only two, I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889); of La duchessa di Leyra, according to Treccani, only a few opening pages survive.

I Malavoglia met a cold reception from critics on publication, with the exception of Luigi Capuana. It was translated into English as The House by the Medlar Tree in 1890, and later again by D.H. Lawrence. Mastro-don Gesualdo, published eight years later, received an excellent reception from the start.

The other major works

Before and after the two Cycle of the Vanquished novels, Verga published some of the works still most read in Italian schools. Vita dei campi (1880) was a major success and gathers stories including Rosso Malpelo, Cavalleria rusticana and La lupa. This same ground, of a newly unified Italy struggling to become a shared nation, is also covered in the Recap on Alessandro Manzoni and The Betrothed, the novel that had first sought a common language and prose for the country. Novelle rusticane (1883, published in Turin by Casanova) portrays what Treccani calls the “cult of property,” an obsession with land and ownership that, in Sicily after Italian unification, was bound up with a marginalisation still unresolved: the same source describes these stories as clarifying “the misunderstanding of the Risorgimento,” showing how religion, justice, politics and the economy remained open problems in post-unification Sicily.

Verga’s legacy

The English Wikipedia calls Verga the greatest Italian novelist after Manzoni, a critical judgement rather than a settled fact, but one that conveys the weight of his work. Verismo’s techniques shaped Luigi Pirandello in particular, as well as the writer Federigo Tozzi, and later, more markedly, Italian Neorealism, the film and literary movement that between 1943 and 1955 returned to depicting ordinary Italian life with an unmediated look at the facts.