by Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga was born in 1840 in Catania, Sicily, to an upper-middle-class family of landowners. His mother, Caterina di Mauro, was considered an intellectual—rare for a woman in those days—and was politically liberal. Verga’s father, Giovanni Battista Verga, descended from a noble family. Verga received his education in a school run by Antonio Abate, a revolutionary who fought in the 1848 uprising in Sicily against the Bourbon monarchs (who ruled Sicily until 1860, the year Italy achieved formal unification). Abate instilled a patriotic, anti-Bourbon sentiment into young Verga. At 18, at his father’s urging, he enrolled in law school at the University of Catania. But far from concentrating wholeheartedly on law, he began to write the historical novel I Carbonari della montagna (1862; The Carbonari of the Mountain). After presenting it to his father as evidence...