Origin Literary was begun between around 1875 and 1895 by a group of writers – mostly novelists and playwrights. It did not constitute a formal school, but it was still based on specific principles. Its birth was influenced by a positivist climate which put absolute faith in science, empiricism and research and which developed from 1830 until the end of the 19th century. It was also clearly based on
naturalism, a literary movement which spread in France in the mid-19th century. Naturalist writers included
Émile Zola and
Guy de Maupassant; for them, literature should objectively portray society and humanity like a photograph, strictly representing even the humblest social class in even its most unpleasant aspects, with the authors analysing real modern life like scientists.
Main figures Literary developed in the fruitful urban cultural life of
Milan, which brought together intellectuals from different areas, but tended to portray central and southern Italian life – Sicily is described in the works of Verga, Capuana and Federico De Roberto, Naples in works by
Matilde Serao and
Salvatore Di Giacomo, Sardinia in the works of
Grazia Deledda, Rome in the poems of
Cesare Pascarella and Tuscany in works by
Renato Fucini.
Verismo, however, exerted some influence also in
northern Italy. In Lombardy
Emilio De Marchi attempted to reconcile the
Manzonian tradition with
verismo by describing the lives of the lower
middle class, most notably in
Demetrio Pianelli (1888). In the North there was also some cross-fertilization between
verismo and the
Scapigliatura in, for instance, Remigio Zena's
La bocca del lupo (1892), Gian Pietro Lucini's
Gian Pietro da Core (1885), and Paolo Valera's
La folla (1901). Though its key proponents were primarily novelists, a certain form of
verismo is also visible in verse: Lorenzo Stecchetti (
Olindo Guerrini) makes deliberate attempts to shock in his treatment of
erotic and social themes, and Vittorio Betteloni writes about the bourgeoisie in a deliberately prosaic manner. In the theatre it was again Verga who established veristic drama, with the 1884 stage version of
Cavalleria rusticana, which was a personal triumph for the actress
Eleonora Duse. Another prominent exponent of veristic drama was the poet and librettist
Giuseppe Giacosa, a close friend of Verga's. , one of the main exponents of in literature, and the author of the novel
Giacinta, generally regarded as the "manifesto" of the movement. The first author to theorize on Italian was Capuana, who theorized the "poetry of the real" – thus Verga, at first part of the late
Romantic literary movement (he was called the poet of the duchesses and had considerable success), later shifted to with his short story collections
Vita dei campi and
Novelle rusticane and finally with the first novel of the 'Ciclo dei Vinti' cycle,
I Malavoglia in 1881. Sicilian-born, Verga lived in
Florence during the same period as the painters – 1865 to 1867 – and his best known story, "
Cavalleria rusticana", contains certain verbal parallels to the effects achieved on canvas by the
Tuscan landscape school of this era. "Espousing an approach that later put him in the field of verismo, his particular sentence structure and rhythm have some of the qualities of the macchia. Like the Macchiaioli, he was fascinated by topographical exactitude set in a nationalist framework" – to quote from
Albert Boime's work,
The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento. Verga and differed from naturalism, however, in their desire to introduce the reader's point of view on the matter while not revealing the author's personal opinions. The movement had its detractors as well. For example, the
Florentine journalist and playwright
Luigi Alberti considered
verismo to be polluting the minds of young people with ‘everything ugly, mean, and vulgar’ that existed in real life.
Principles The principles of canonical
verismo are as follows: (1) the form must be impersonal; (2) the language and style must accord with the subject matter (if the setting is
working-class, so too must be the lexis and the syntax); (3) the aim is to study modern Italy from the lowest classes to the highest; (4) the method must be scientific, based on a study of the environment (social, economic, geographical, etc.) and in accordance with the
determinist criteria theorized by positivist authors such as
Lombroso.
Verismo differs in important ways from French naturalism: (1) the stylistic aspects of the literary work are emphasized more than scientific ones; (2) it is less manual workers and the city environment which are represented than the peasantry and provincial life.
Legacy The early novels of
Gabriele D'Annunzio,
Terra vergine and
Novelle della Pescara, were heavily influenced by
verismo. Traces of the poetics of verismo persist in the early
Pirandello, in
Il turno, ''L'esclusa'', and his first novelle, and, a little later, in the Tuscan
Federigo Tozzi. The work of verist writers like De Roberto influenced
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's
The Leopard. But the major subsequent influence was on
Neorealism (1943–55). ==See also==