Life in the Country

Published in 1880, one year before Vergas influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism. The collections centrepiece, Rustic Honour (Cavalleria rusticana) which was famously adapted into a play by the author before becoming an opera by Mascagni tells the tale of Turiddu, a poor young man who returns from military service and finds himself embroiled in adultery and a feud with a rival. Also including the well-known stories She-Wolf and Foxfur, Life in the Country captures, in an objective, non-judgemental prose, the difficult conditions and personal struggles of the peasant class in his native Sicily at the turn of the twentieth century.