author
Giovanni Verga
1840–1922
A leading voice of Italian realism, his fiction gave unforgettable life to ordinary Sicilian people and the hard social world around them. Best known for I Malavoglia and Mastro-don Gesualdo, he helped define the verismo movement.
3 Audiobooks
The House by the Medlar-Tree
by Giovanni Verga
La vida en los campos: novelas cortas
by Giovanni Verga
About the author
Born in Catania, Sicily, on September 2, 1840, Giovanni Verga became the major figure of Italian verismo, a realist literary movement focused on everyday life and social struggle. He wrote novels, short stories, and plays, and his reputation grew steadily until he came to be seen as one of Italy’s greatest modern writers.
After early literary work and time spent in Florence and Milan, Verga developed the style for which he is most remembered: spare, unsentimental, and deeply attentive to the lives of working people, especially in Sicily. His most famous books, I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), are often treated as masterpieces of European realism.
Much of his writing centers on people facing poverty, ambition, family duty, and social change. That clear-eyed focus gives his work its lasting power. Verga died in Catania on January 27, 1922, but his stories still stand as some of the strongest portraits of Sicilian life in modern literature.