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Under the Shadow of Etna

Giovanni Verga

Book Overview: 

The short stories of Giovanni Verga, one of the leading authors of Italian verismo, or realism, tell mostly of working-class characters in rural, 19th-century Sicily. One of these stories, "Rustic Chivalry," or "Cavalleria rusticana," was the basis for the opera of the same name by Mascagni

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Book Excerpt: 
. . . round to look at the roof under which she had slept so long, and she went to do God's will in the city, with 18 her baby boy, near the prison in which Gramigna was incarcerated. She could see nothing else besides the black grated windows along the mighty silent façade, and the sentinels drove her away if she stopped to look where he might be. At last she was told that he had not been there for some time, that he had been taken away to the other side of the sea, manacled, and with a basket fastened over his shoulder.

She said nothing. She did not go away; for she knew not where to go, and she had nothing more to expect. She made a shift to live, doing chores for the soldiers, for the prisoners, as if she herself made a part of that black and silent building; and she felt for the carabineers who had taken Gramigna in the thicket of prickly pears, and who had broken his leg with their shots, a sort of respectful tenderness, as it were a brute admiration. . . Read More

Community Reviews

A good introduction to Verga

This is a short collection that includes most of Verga’s more famous stories. Sicilian literature is quite Gothic, and Virga’s stories give you a good look into the austere moral and social existence that typified 19th century Sicily.