Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) was born in Catania, Sicily, into a landowning family, and came of age in an Italy in the process of becoming a nation. He published his first novel as a young man and spent the next two decades moving between Sicily, Florence, and Milan, absorbing the literary currents of his era: Romanticism, scapigliatura, and finally the French naturalism that would transform his work.

The mature Verga is the author of I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), stark and unsentimental novels of Sicilian peasant life that established him as the central figure of Italian verismo and earned him a place in the European realist tradition. D. H. Lawrence admired him and translated him. He has been compared to Hardy and Flaubert.

But Storia di una capinera is the Verga that comes before all that: the Romantic Verga, the one still capable of writing with open emotion about love and confinement and loss. It is the novel that first made him known across Italy, and it has a claim to readers that his later, harder masterpieces do not quite make in the same way.

Verga in the Espresso Italian Classics

Story of a Blackcap March 2027

Storia di una capinera · Giovanni Verga, 1871

Translated from the Italian and introduced by Idara Crespi

Kindle & Paperback Forthcoming March 2027

Giovanni Verga’s first popular success, published in 1871: the novel that established his reputation before the darker realist work for which he is best known. Written entirely in letters, it tells the story of a young woman confined to a convent against her will, whose correspondence with a childhood friend becomes her one connection to the world outside. Heartbreaking and formally precise, it has been read in Italy for 150 years and comes into English here in a new literary translation.

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Paperback edition available March 2027.

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Translated from the Italian and introduced by Idara Crespi.

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