![]() In 1947 Visconti made a movie, La Terra Trema, out of Verga’s I Malavoglia (known in English as “The House by the Medlar Tree”), filming it in the very Sicilian fishing village-Aci-Trezza-that is the setting of the novel. Lawrence, who admired both writers and translated three of the latter’s books, asked-complained-back in the 1920s: “Who still reads them, even (outside the classroom) in Italy?” You can ask the same question today. She did nevertheless produce two outstanding if very different novelists in the nineteenth century: Alessandro Manzoni, whose I Promessi Sposi (“The Betrothed”), written in the 1820s, is a vivid, discursively narrated work of Romantic historism and Giovanni Verga, writing toward the end of the century, the chief figure of Italian verismo and one of the great European realists, though little recognized outside his own country. That had to wait till the twentieth century. Italy, a late united nation, lagged too in producing a modern narrative literature. ![]()
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