In the history of Sicilian art and Literature there have been periods of tremendous creativity and others
when little of note was produced,
the 13th-century Sicilian school of lyric poetry, 19th-century verismo or realism
and Luigi Pirandello‘s novels and plays scale the eights of Italian and European literary production.
In the field of art, Sicily has produced such great artists as Antonello da Messina,
one of the great figures in 15th-century rationalism and portraiture,
and the modern painter Renato Guttuso.
The writers Giovanni Verga and Federico De Roberto became the mainspring of the realistic novel, verismo.
This style of writing was an extreme and, to a certain extent, more refined version of French naturalism as embodied
in the work of Emile Zola.
Giovanni Verga was born in Catania in1840.
After producing work in a late romantic vein,
in the 1870s he was drawn to French naturalism,
by creating his so-called ” poetic of the defeated”,
which he set out to depict the hardship of contemporary social reality.
He began with short stories set in arural context
which were followed by his masterpieces,
the novels I Malavoglia and Mastro don Gesualdo,
which both depict the immutable Sicilian society of the time.