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Giovanni Verga
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By Niccolò Graffio
“To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The travesty that produced the modern country of Italy worked to suppress in no small way the native cultures of Southern Italy, but it could not destroy them. As the advocates of Risorgimento moved to center the political life of the nascent state around Rome (and the economic life in the north) they likewise tried to stifle the art, music and literature of Due Sicilie by denigrating them as ‘inferior’. Many Southern Italian culture producers of note, such as the great opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, were relegated to obscurity in favor of those born and bred in the north. In Bellini’s case, his obscurity would last until he was ‘rediscovered’ in the middle part of the 20th century in large part thanks to the efforts of a non-Italian, the legendary soprano Dame Joan Sutherland.
Sadly, this effort towards cultural genocide was in many ways successful. Unlike other European immigrants who kept the memory and traditions of their motherlands’ cultures alive in their hearts, in most cases Southern Italian immigrants, being largely uneducated, had no connection with theirs. They readily adopted the culture of the new land in their zeal to become ‘assimilated’.
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| Photos of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone |
If they had any desire to maintain contact with the Old World, it was to preserve the “Italian” identity imposed upon them by their conquerors. The organizations they created here to preserve their ‘ethnic identity’ even promoted the cultural hegemony of their former rulers to their new American neighbors. Thus, today if anyone in America knows anything at all about ‘Italians’, it is invariably Northern Italians such as Columbus, Da Vinci, Verdi or Garibaldi.
Try to find an Italian here, especially one from Southern Italy, who knows anything at all about such notables as Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Antonello da Messina or Salvatore Quasimodo. Good luck. Yet ironically, at one time all these men were lauded throughout Europe. What Southern Italian culture that did survive here was usually in the form of local festivals that kept alive the religious traditions of towns and villages long abandoned.
Northern Italians who immigrated here learned, to their surprise, the Anglos, Germans and Irishmen who already lived here liked them only somewhat better than their vassals from the southern part of “the old country”. Anti-Italianism, it seems, is a rich American tradition that can trace its roots back to before the beginning of this country’s independence from the UK. Nativists who previously disdained German immigrants for not speaking English and Irish immigrants for being Catholic found a two-fold reason for disliking Italians. Let’s not also forget that all Italians, being peoples from the sunny Mediterranean region, tend to be darker in complexion than peoples from Northern Europe.
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| Photos of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone |
As I mentioned earlier, the drive to suppress the native cultures of Southern Italy did not succeed entirely. The brutal occupation and indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of our people completed the infamous Risorgimento. In its aftermath, however, many of our people continued to write prose and poetry and compose music about the now-named il Mezzogiorno and its people, much to the consternation of the cultural hegemonists to the north. Even worse, many of these writers, poets and composers achieved fame in their own right! In the 20th century, for example, two Southern Italians each won the Nobel Prize in Literature in part for their works on life in Southern Italy: Luigi Pirandello (1934) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1959).
Though America has strangely never had an official language, until recently in its history there was a subtle (and not so subtle) drive to get immigrants to abandon their ancestral tongues in favor of English. The drive towards bilingualism did not begin until my lifetime. As a result, unlike Europe, where it is not at all unusual to meet people who can speak two (sometimes three) languages, America evolved into a land where often only the most educated were exposed to the literature of non-English-speaking countries.
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| Photos of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone |
This creates a difficulty for two reasons. Many good and sometimes even great works of literature are never read here because few wish to go through the trouble of translating them. Another major problem is the fact that often a great work of literature cannot be truly appreciated unless it is read in the language in which it was written. Among European-Americans, German-Americans are said to be the largest ethnic group. How many of them have ever sat down and read the works of the legendary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest writer, in the original German (or even in English)? Small wonder then so many in Europe regard Americans as uneducated buffoons!
Imagine then, the difficulty for our people, especially at a time when Italian language classes seem to be on the endangered species list at schools across this country! The subject of this article, for example, is generally regarded by modern literary critics as one of the greatest novelists in Italian history. I am ashamed to admit that even though I am passionate about the history and culture of our people, until recently I have never heard of him!
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| Photos of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone |
Giovanni Carmelo Verga was born on September 2nd, 1840 in the town of Vizzini in province of Catania, Sicily when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was still extant. He was already a young man when the horror of the Piedmontese invasion destroyed his homeland’s independence and eventually forced hundreds of thousands of his people to seek refuge overseas.
His parents, Giovanni Verga and Catarina (née Di Mauro), were prosperous Sicilian landowners who could afford to send their son to the University of Catania to study law. Giovanni, however, was already honing his talents as a writer and wished to puruse a literary career, instead. In his teens he wrote an historical novel, Amore e Patria (It: Love and Country) which remained largely unpublished. While at university he used money his father had sent him to publish his book I Carbonari della Montagna (The Carbonari of the Mountain) in 1862.
While cutting his chops as a writer he also served as a member of the Catanian National Guard from 1860-64. After this he traveled to the northern part of the nascent state of Italy where he eventually settled in the city of Florence in 1869. Three years later he moved to Milan where he reinvented himself as a writer. He combined psychological observation with romantic elements to write historical and patriotic novels. He also now began to utilize the technique of using dialogue to ‘flesh out’ the characters in his books.
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| Photos of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone |
Unlike other writers of his time and location who preferred to write stories with larger than life characters and themes, Verga preferred using simpler folk from Southern Italy, especially his native Sicily. Novels such as Eva (1873), Tigre reale (Royal Tigress; 1873) and Eros (1875) were works that Verga would later say were novels of “elegance and adultery.”
By the following decade he had come into his own, developing the literary skills that transformed him into one of the major European novelists of the late 19th century. It was during the 1880’s he wrote his masterpieces, including the short stories of Vita dei campi (Life in the Fields; 1880) and Novelle rusticane (Little Novels of Sicily; 1883). It was also during this time he wrote his singular greatest work – I malavoglia (The Malavoglia Family; 1881). An English translation of this work entitled The House by the Medlar Tree (translated by Mary A. Craig) was published in America in 1890.
The 1948 Italian film La Terra Trema (“The Earth Trembles”) directed by Luchino Visconti, was based on I malavoglia. The original novel deals with a family of Sicilian fishermen who live and work in the village of Aci Trezza in the Province of Catania, Sicily. United by culture and ethnicity, they are nonetheless divided by old rivalries. Literary historians consider it one of the greatest works of its time.
Eight years after writing I malavoglia, Verga would write the last major work of his career, Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889).
Verga’s novels pulled no punches, something which irked many of the critics of his day. All the violence, lust and adultery that were characteristic of Sicilian life at that time found their way into the pages of Verga’s writings. Those who found fault with Verga for this missed the point of his novels – it was this grittiness that was inherent in Sicilian life that he wanted to show to the world.
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| Photo of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone |
He could have glossed over all the unpleasantness and painted a rosy picture for his readers, as many writers throughout the world did (and still do). Verga, however, wished to show his readers the darker side of life in Sicily and Southern Italy. For this, he is regarded as one of the founders of the Verismo (Realist) school of Italian writing.
In addition to being a Realist, Giovanni Verga was a Sicilian! Though he was initially a supporter of the Risorgimento, he lived long enough to see the false promises its adherents espoused being shattered. Material prosperity would only be for the northern part of the new country at the expense of the southern part. Ultimately he turned against it. To him, there was no ‘Italy’, there was only one’s region. After he moved back to the town of his youth in 1879 his books and plays displayed an unmistakable aversion to high society and urban sophistication.
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Photo of Giovanni Verga's House Museum courtesy of Olivia Cerrone
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His later writings also reveal a marked tendency towards the fatalism that was and is characteristic of the Sicilian psyche. His characters were often involved in struggles to better themselves materially; a struggle that was invariably doomed from the start.
His later years were spent with him being active in local politics. He was elected to the Italian Senate in 1920. He died on January 27th, 1922 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
My voyage of discovery of my Southern Italian roots includes reading as many of the writings of this great novelist as I can find that have been translated into English. If I ever manage to obtain fluency in the Italian language, I shall consider it a privilege to enjoy the master’s works in the pen in which they were written.
Further reading:
• Giovanna Verga: Little Novels of Sicily (translated by D.H. Lawrence); Steerforth Italia, 2000
• Giovanni Verga: Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories (translated by G.H. McWilliam); Penguin Classics, 2000
• Giovanni Verga: I Malavoglia: The House by the Medlar Tree (translated by Judith Landry); Dedalus European Classics, 2008
