La vida en el campo

In the stories that make up Life in the Countryside, Giovanni Verga recounts, with a restrained emotion and a keen ear for the speech of ordinary people, the lives and deaths of those Sicilians who never appeared in novels: impoverished peasants, unlucky shepherds, miners swallowed by the earth, fishermen living in inhospitable places (like those in Roberto Rossellini's film Stromboli), lovestruck ex-soldiers, harvesters bewitched by passion… Lives and deaths portrayed without artifice, in the stark light of a realism nonetheless animated by a profound poetic feeling and by the immeasurable empathy of one who embraces the sentiment of the Sicilian people, with their ancestral hatreds, their impetuous eroticism, their resignation in the face of their tragic destiny, as well as their sense of honor and dignity.