Description
The Giovanni Verga House Museum is the Catania apartment where the father of verismo spent his childhood and nearly all of the last thirty years of his life. It is on the second floor of a 19th-century building on Via Sant'Anna, in the historic center, and still keeps its original interiors.
The heart of the visit is the writer's study, with his complete library: about 2,600 volumes on six walnut bookcases. Next to Capuana, Deledda and Marinetti stand the Russians and the French: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola.
The display cases show copies of the manuscripts; the originals are kept in the library of the University of Catania. The furniture belonged to the writer and his family.
His very birth in this house is a small mystery. The official record has Giovanni Verga born in 1840 at Via Sant'Anna 8, and in 1940 the house was declared a national monument as his birthplace. But it has long been suspected that the baby was born in Vizzini, his father's family's hometown, and registered in Catania.
After his long years in Florence and Milan, Verga came back to Catania for good in 1893 and died in this house on January 27, 1922, with his friend De Roberto at his side. When his brother Pietro died in 1903, he took in Pietro's three children and adopted them; the eldest, Giovanni Verga Patriarca, inherited most of his uncle's estate.
When the last heir died, in 1980 the Region of Sicily bought the apartment, restored it and opened it as a literary museum.
In those Catania years Verga also took up photography, a passion he shared with his friends Capuana and De Roberto. His glass plates, found in Via Sant'Anna decades after his death, portray his mother, his brothers, his uncles and the farmers of the family estate at Tébidi, near Vizzini.
The heart of the visit is the writer's study, with his complete library: about 2,600 volumes on six walnut bookcases. Next to Capuana, Deledda and Marinetti stand the Russians and the French: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola.
The display cases show copies of the manuscripts; the originals are kept in the library of the University of Catania. The furniture belonged to the writer and his family.
His very birth in this house is a small mystery. The official record has Giovanni Verga born in 1840 at Via Sant'Anna 8, and in 1940 the house was declared a national monument as his birthplace. But it has long been suspected that the baby was born in Vizzini, his father's family's hometown, and registered in Catania.
After his long years in Florence and Milan, Verga came back to Catania for good in 1893 and died in this house on January 27, 1922, with his friend De Roberto at his side. When his brother Pietro died in 1903, he took in Pietro's three children and adopted them; the eldest, Giovanni Verga Patriarca, inherited most of his uncle's estate.
When the last heir died, in 1980 the Region of Sicily bought the apartment, restored it and opened it as a literary museum.
In those Catania years Verga also took up photography, a passion he shared with his friends Capuana and De Roberto. His glass plates, found in Via Sant'Anna decades after his death, portray his mother, his brothers, his uncles and the farmers of the family estate at Tébidi, near Vizzini.