Giovanni Verga - writer

Sicilian remembered as one of Italy’s greatest novelists

Giovanni Verga wrote short stories 
and novels from an early age

The writer Giovanni Verga, regarded by some as the greatest Italian novelist after Alessandro Manzoni, was born on this day in 1840 in the Catania area of southeast Sicily.

Verga wrote romantic and historical novels in the early part of his career but later shifted his focus to what became known as verismo, a style rooted in stark realism, focused on unvarnished depictions of rural and working‑class life.

His major works include the novels I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), which have come to be seen as his masterpieces, and his short story collections Vita dei campi (1880) and Novelle rusticane (1883). 

The opera composer Pietro Mascagni can be given some credit for introducing Verga’s work to wider audiences. His most famous composition, Cavalleria rusticana, which premiered in 1890, was based on a short story and play by Verga of the same name, written 10 years earlier.

Verga grew up as part of a bourgeois family with noble origins, whose forebears are thought to have arrived in Sicily from Aragon, in Spain. Though the family home was in Catania, where his birth was registered, some sources say he was born in a house in Vizzini, a hilltop town 60km (36 miles) south of Catania, others that he was born on a country estate in nearby Tiepidi, perhaps because the family relocated there during a cholera outbreak. 

Verga began writing in his teens and continued while ostensibly studying law at the University of Catania. His early works, such as Amore e Patria (Love and Homeland), I carbonari della montagna (The Carbonari of the Mountain) and Sulle lagune (On the Lagoons) had historical, patriotic themes.

At the time of Italian Unification, in 1860-61, Verga served with the Catania National Guard, which was charged with keeping order following Giuseppe Garibaldi’s conquest of Sicily. Several times between 1860 and 1864, this service required him to visit Florence.

During one extended stay in the Tuscan capital he wrote Una peccatrice (translated into English as A Mortal Sin), which was much different from his previous work in that its subject matter was a passionate romance. After settling in Florence, where he wrote Storia di una capinera - translated as The Sparrow - a novel about the plight of a girl forced by circumstance to become a nun, he began to be influenced by the Scapigliatura movement.

A 1907 edition of Verga's 
acclaimed I Malavoglia

The Scapigliatura - which literally translates as ‘dishevelment’ - were a somewhat bohemian, anti‑establishment artistic group based primarily in Milan from the late 1850s to the 1870s. Its writers were generally young and disillusioned, yet cosmopolitan, and determined to break with the polite, patriotic literature of post‑Unification Italy.

The movement’s rejection of romantic idealisation, its fascination with the darker edges of modern life, and its stylistic experimentation played a key part in Verga’s transition to verismo.

His 1873 novel Eva, in which the rejection of romanticism is a central theme, provided an early manifestation of this shift in style, which gained pace after he moved to Milan and became part of the city’s literary circle, fully embracing Scapagliato themes in his next two novels Tigre reale (The Royal Tigress) and Eros.

The evolution of Verga’s writing into the starker verismo that became his hallmark followed the arrival in Milan - by then the home of most of Italy’s major newspapers and publishing houses - of his close friend, Luigi Capuana, another Sicilian writer.  They were both deeply impressed by L'Assommoir - The Drinking Den - which is regarded as one of the finest works of Émile Zola, a major figure in the Naturalism movement in French literature.

This became the inspiration for the verismo movement, which they set out to create in order to fill a gap they perceived in Italian literature.

Encouraged by the reception for his short stories, exploring the verismo themes of poverty, fatalism, family duty, social immobility, honour codes, and the harsh economics of survival, often set in the fishing villages and rural communities of his native Sicily, Verga wrote I Malavoglia - published in English as The House by the Medlar Tree - and Mastro-don Gesualdo to great critical acclaim, even though the financial returns were modest. 

Verga is commemorated in many ways in Catania,
including this bust in the Giardino Bellini

He had planned that they would be the first two in a cycle of five novels - to be entitled I vinti (The Vanquished) - but no more were written.

This was probably for a variety of reasons. The first two novels had been enormously demanding projects, draining his creativity. He also became highly critical of his own prose, rewriting extensively but sometimes abandoning entire drafts.  He found writing for the theatre more rewarding financially, although he endured a long dispute with Mascagni over royalties from Cavalleria rusticana.

In any case, his income from family properties in Sicily provided him with a comfortable lifestyle. The management of these properties also took up time.

After spending decades in Milan, Verga increasingly retreated to Catania and his family estate. Never married, he became a public figure locally - a respected gentleman, landowner, and cultural authority, who was eventually named a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy - but his national literary engagement dwindled. New movements emerged, leaving verismo behind.

Moreover, by the second decade of the new century, he was elderly and ill. His last years were spent almost entirely in Catania, with no major writing projects. He died there in January, 1922.

If Verga’s ambitions remained unfulfilled, he left a deep influence on Italian literature. His work is still part of the curriculum in Italian schools. He sits alongside Luigi Pirandello and Leonardo Sciascia as part of the great triumvirate of Sicilian literature.

His legacy can also be seen in the neorealism movement that revived Italian cinema in the postwar years, in particular in the films of Luchino Visconti, who often drew on Verga’s themes. Visconti’s second major feature, his 1948 film La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) was an adaptation, if a loose one, of I Malavoglia.

The Verga family home in
Catania now houses a museum

Travel tip:

The Verga family home at Via Sant'Anna 8 in Catania is now given over in part to the Casa Museo Giovanni Verga, a literary museum dedicated to preserving Giovanni Verga’s memory. The museum occupies the second floor of a late 18th century palazzo, which was declared a national monument in 1940. The preserved living spaces still retain the original furnishings. The writer's library, in his private study, consists of more than 2,600 volumes. Copies of Verga's manuscripts are exhibited inside the display cases, while the originals are kept in the library of the University of Catania. A lectern stands in front of the large window in the living room, at which Verga would write his poems and essays observing the daily life of people who passed by on Via Sant'Anna. Paintings, prints and engravings by artists who were friends of Verga adorn the walls. A collection of photographs, mainly of family and friends, taken by Verga himself was discovered at the house shortly after his death. Via Sant’Anna one of several streets linking Via Vittorio Emanuele II with the parallel Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, just a five-minute walk from Catania’s duomo, the Basilica Cattedrale di Sant’Agata.

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Luchino Visconti's 1948 film La
terra trema was filmed in Aci Trezza

Travel tip:

Aci Trezza, a picturesque fishing village on the Ionian coast, located about 15km (9 miles) north of Catania, was immortalised as the setting for his masterpiece novel I Malavoglia, which revolved around the struggles of the Toscano fishing family. A local museum, Casa del Nespolo, housed in a traditional 19th-century house, features memorabilia, photographs, and exhibits dedicated to Verga's work.  Luchino Visconti filmed La terra trema,  his 1948 neo-realist cinematic adaptation of Verga's novel, on location in Aci Trezza, with some local residents in the cast. Off the coast, jagged dark basalt sea stacks known as i faraglioni rise straight out of the water. Greek mythology holds that these massive volcanic rocks were hurled at Odysseus by the blinded giant Polyphemus as the hero escaped. Isola Lachea, another large offshore rock, functions as a protected nature reserve rich in local marine and plant species. Other attractions include the  Baroque architecture of the church of San Giovanni Battista and the Norman Castle, standing tall above the village, which also offers a vantage point from which to watch the annual Vele dei Malavoglia regatta. 

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More reading:

Alessandro Manzoni, the writer credited with Italy’s greatest novel 

How Leonardo Sciascia mercilessly exposed Mafia links with Italian politics

Luigi Capuana, a leading figure in the verismo movement

Also on this day:

1753: The birth of Marie Josephine of Savoy

1898: The birth of baker and chocolatier Pietro Ferrero

1938: The birth of actor Giuliano Gemma

1964: The birth of businessman and coffee-maker Andrea Illy

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Ettore Majorana - theoretical physicist

‘Genius’ who disappeared in mysterious circumstances

Ettore Majorana was seen by colleagues
as both a genius and an enigma

The theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana, whose work in the 1930s is still reaping profound benefits in nuclear, medical and computer science but ended with his sudden disappearance in 1938, was born on this day in 1906 in Catania in Sicily.

Majorana, who became part of a team of scientists working with the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in Rome, was regarded as a genius by his contemporaries, capable of solving in his head problems that others might take years to unravel.

While much of Majorana’s work in such areas as particles, their exchange interaction, matter and anti-matter, might seem dry and beyond the comprehension of non-scientists, it has consequences still seen today.

More reliable designs for nuclear reactors, advancements in medical isotopes used in cancer scans and treatments, more precise radiation dosages in radiotherapy, plus technological developments in quantum computing, can all be traced back to theories put forward by Majorana.

Yet his mysterious disappearance when seemingly on the cusp of achieving immortal status in the scientific world has given rise to as much discussion as the legacy of his work.

Majorana hailed from a scientific family. His father, Fabio, was an engineer in the telegraph and telephone industries, while an uncle, Quirino Majorana, was an experimental physicist at the University of Bologna.

Ettore Majorana enrolled at the Sapienza University of Rome to study engineering in 1923, but switched to physics in 1928 with the encouragement of Emilio Segrè, a fellow student who would go on to become a leading nuclear physicist and radiochemist and, like Fermi, a winner of the Nobel Prize.

A brilliant student, Majorana was still in his early 20s when he joined the group of scientists assembled by Fermi, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, who became known as the "Via Panisperna boys", named after the street address of their laboratory.

Majorana's disappearance, as reported by the
Milan newspaper Domenica del Corriere

Yet, for all his brilliance, Majorana as a person was an enigma. Unlike some of his colleagues, he never craved fame or recognition. He was rarely satisfied with a piece of work and would seldom publish his findings. Colleagues would describe him as distant and withdrawn.

He joined Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in 1933 and spent time in Leipzig, working with Werner Heisenberg, a theoretical physicist who would in time become a scientist on Germany’s nuclear programme in World War Two. The Nazis came to power while Majorana was there and he expressed solidarity with many of Hitler’s views and policies.

Shortly before his disappearance, he had been appointed a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Naples. 

He vanished during or after a trip to Palermo in March, 1938. It was thought he might have been planning to visit his friend, Emilio Segrè, who was a professor at the university there.

But a letter sent by Majorana while he was in the Sicilian capital suggested a different reason for his journey. It was to Professor Antonio Carrelli, the director of the Physics Institute at the University of Naples, seemingly signalling his resignation. It spoke of making “a decision that has become unavoidable”.

Confusingly - before the original letter arrived - Carrelli received a telegram from Majorana apparently withdrawing his resignation and saying that he was returning to Naples.

Majorana bought a ticket for a boat back to Naples but while porters found luggage in his cabin after the passengers had disembarked, there was no sign of Majorana, nor any proof that he had ever been on board. 

Majorana's name is among those on a plaque marking
the Rome base of the "Via Panisperna boys"

Multiple theories have been put forward to explain his disappearance, including suicide, murder, a desire to start a new life in another country, or even that he had decided to seek the anonymity of life in a monastery.

Proponents of the suicide theory suggested that Majorana realised that the research in which he had been involved would eventually lead to the creation of highly destructive weapons and suffered intolerable remorse as a consequence.

Others theorised that, during his time in Germany, he had learned too much about Nazi ambitions to develop a nuclear bomb and was murdered by Nazi agents.

But with no body ever found, and no witnesses to any suicide or murder, neither could be proved.

Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian writer, supported the idea that Majorana was appalled at the thought of his works being used to create nuclear explosives but suggested that, as a devout Catholic, he would have more likely sought to live an anonymous life in a monastery or other religious retreat than to take his own life.

The official explanation - reached 77 years after he vanished - is that he emigrated to South America.

A postage stamp issued on the
centenary of Majorana's birth

This gained credence in 2011 when a supposed witness made a statement about meeting Majorana in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, in the years after World War Two. A photo also came to light, taken in Argentina 1955 of a man bearing several facial similarities to Majorana.

The case looking into his disappearance was reopened in Italy as a result. Four years later, the Rome Attorney’s Office was sufficiently satisfied that Majorana had been alive and living in Venezuela in the 1950s to declare the case closed, with no crime to investigate.

In 2025, the civil section of the Court of Rome issued a decree declaring Majorana’s presumed death.

Today, academics in the field of theoretical physics encounter his name recalled in such things as the Majorana equation, Majorana fermions, and Microsoft’s Majorana 1, a device used in the development of quantum computers. 

A Majorana Prize is awarded annually for outstanding contributions to theoretical and mathematical physics. A postage stamp commemorating his life was issued in 2006 on the centenary of his birth.

Catania's Cattedrale di Sant'Agata is a beautiful
example of Sicilian Baroque architecture

Travel tip:

The city of Catania, which is located on the east coast of Sicily facing the Ionian Sea, is one of the ten biggest cities in Italy, with a population including the environs of 1.12 million. A little like Naples, which sits in the shadow of Vesuvius, Catania lives with the constant threat of a natural catastrophe, more so given that its neighbour, Mount Etna, is active and regularly erupts, if not with explosive force. Catania has also been virtually destroyed by earthquakes twice, in 1169 as well as 1693. As such it has a reputation for living life to the full. In the Renaissance, it was one of Italy's most important cultural, artistic and political centres and enjoys a rich cultural legacy today, with numerous museums and churches, theatres and parks, and many restaurants. Catania’s historic centre is a showcase of Sicilian Baroque, rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake using the city’s signature black lava stone. A notable example is the Duomo of Sant’Agata, a monumental cathedral, home to the relics of St Agatha and framed by a grand piazza, at the centre of which is the Fontana dell’Elefante, the symbol of the city - a Roman basalt elephant supporting an obelisk. 

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The University of Naples Federico II has its
headquarters building in Corso Umberto I

Travel tip:

The University of Naples Federico II, where Ettore Majorana was appointed a professor shortly before he disappeared, was founded in 1224 by the Emperor Frederick II. It is one of Europe’s most historically significant universities: the oldest public, secular university in the world.  One of its most famous students was the theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, who went on to lecture there in the 13th century. Other alumni include Enrico De Nicola, the first President of the Italian Republic, and two other presidents, Giovanni Leone and Giorgio Napolitano. The university’s main locations include the central headquarters in Corso Umberto I, with additional sites in Portici, Torre del Greco, Anacapri, Avellino, and Bellizzi. A former college built in the 16th century in Via Paladino, in the area of Spaccanapoli, has been one of the university’s main buildings since 1777. With more than 70,000 students, 180 degree programmes across 26 departments, and strong research output, especially in engineering, medicine, and agricultural sciences, it ranks second among Italy’s major universities and is the leading university in Southern Italy.

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More reading:

Enrico Fermi, dubbed the architect of the nuclear age

The Italian nuclear physicist who defected to the Soviet Union

Leonardo Sciascia, the writer who denounced complicity between government and the Mafia

Also on this day: 

1607: The birth of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, patron of the arts 

1623: The birth of composer Antonio Cesti

1694: The birth of comic opera composer Leonardo Leo

1953: The birth of Felice Casson, magistrate who exposed NATO’s secret army 

2002: The death of novelist Franco Lucentini

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