Giovanni Carmelo Verga is a prominent Italian writer. Founder of the Verismo movement (“vero” is Italian for “truth”), his major works were written at the turn of the twentieth century. Verga was born in Sicily in 1840 and shared his time between the cultural centers of Florence and Milan and his childhood landscape. His late return to this landscape, at the age of forty, produced his central and most famous pieces, I Malavoglia and Maestro-don Gesualdo, both of which take place in Sicily and focus on its rural characters, who are sentenced to an almost feudal life of oppressive labor. Above all, Verga is known for his precise linguistic representation of the Sicilian dialect, the use of a groundbreaking free and indirect speech technique and the way he assimilates the voice of the narrator in the local jargon and reality.