Verismo

Verismo, Italian for realism, was an Italian literary movement of the late nineteenth century, closely related to but distinct from French Naturalism, that portrayed the lives of ordinary people, especially the rural poor of Sicily and southern Italy, with an unsentimental attention to dialect, local custom and social hardship. Its founding and central figure, Giovanni Verga, developed a narrative technique in which the author largely withdraws from explicit commentary, letting characters' own speech and perspective carry the story, most fully realized in his novels I Malavoglia and Mastro-don Gesualdo and short stories such as Cavalleria Rusticana. Luigi Capuana, Verga's friend and the movement's principal theorist, articulated verismo's aesthetic program in critical essays, and the movement's unadorned, regionally grounded realism strongly influenced the operatic verismo of composers such as Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini, who adapted several of its stories for the stage.