. . . il vero
dell aspra sorte e del depresso loco
che natura ci die..br
—Leopardi, La Ginestra

Italy, a late united nation, lagged too in producing a modern narrative literature. That had to wait till the twentieth century. 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. D. H. Lawrence, who admired both writers and translated three of the latters books, asked—complained—back in the 1920s: "Who still reads them, even (outside the classroom) in Italy?" You can ask ...

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