Giovanni Verga

1840–1922

Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily, was destroyed more than once by earthquakes and eruptions of Mount Aetna. The effect of its late baroque reconstruction begun in 1693, from lava stone, is at once grim and spectacular. Still charged with the weight of disaster, the city personifies drama, destruction and rebirth. Verga, astride the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the eldest author of this collection, was raised there, but to produce his art he had to get away, first to Florence, immersing himself in its literary culture, and then to Milan, where he lived for twenty years (although he made frequent journeys back to Sicily). He was born three months after Thomas Hardy, an author with whom he bears comparison. Both wrote about hardship, family and fatal passions with lyricism and pessimism. Both had complex relationships with their places of origin, which both inspired and alienated them. Verga’s realistic approach – called the school of Verismo in Italian – was a reaction to a movement in the same period called Scapigliatura (devoted, broadly speaking, to interiority, individualism and ideals). Realism, in Verga’s time, was considered an anti-conformist approach to literature: alert to social tensions, refusing to elevate or evade. In reproducing elements of dialect, he allowed characters to sound as they actually would have in real life, and described the poor without sentimentality. In doing so, he broke definitively with the literary aesthetic in Italy that had come before him. Verga wrote seven collections of short stories in his lifetime. ‘Fantasticheria’ (‘Picturesque Lives’), a description of a fishing village, is considered an antecedent to his later masterpiece, a novel called I Malavoglia (The Malavoglia, translated as The House by the Medlar Tree). It was adapted, in 1948, into the neoRealist cinematic classic La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) by Luchino Visconti. But it is more than preparatory work, striking for its epistolary structure, its imagery, its precise yet panoramic vision.

Picturesque Lives

Translated by G. H. McWilliam

Once, when the train was passing by Aci Trezza, you looked out of the carriage window and exclaimed, ‘I’d like to spend a month down there!’