Giovanni Verga

The book collects the short stories of Giovanni Verga, written between 1874 and 1894. The author feels the need for retreat from the intense social life of Milan, longing to “see again” his Sicily, > the immense hearth of the Pino farmstead, on the slopes of Mount Etna . From the urge to return to his roots stems the first story, which encompasses all the major themes of Verga’s fiction. Ned

The novel is set in Sicily in the first half of the nineteenth century: an ancestral, arid land, > a sun-scorched expanse, hills upon hills, tumbling over one another, bare, parched, stony, scattered with rare and stunted olive trees, with dusty prickly pears . Ever since his youth, Mastro Don Gesualdo has toiled relentlessly to amass wealth and > defend his property against everyone, to pur

The setting is a fishing village in late nineteenth-century Sicily. The Malavoglia are a family of fishermen, owners of a boat (the *Provvidenza*) and a home with a small plot of land (the house by the medlar tree). Life unfolds serenely and with dignity within a community that respects the Malavoglia because they are economically self-sufficient. In short order, a succession of misfortunes plu