Giovanni Carmelo Verga di Fontanabianca (Catania, 2 September 1840 – Catania, 27 January 1922) was an Italian writer and playwright, regarded as the leading exponent of Verismo.
His work marked the transition from Romanticism to a realistic and objective representation of reality, focusing on the “humble” and on life in rural Sicily. Born into a bourgeois family, he initially devoted himself to writing adventure novels influenced by the works of Alexandre Dumas père; later he wrote novels centred on passionate themes, including Storia di una capinera, which achieved considerable success. He moved to Florence in 1869 and three years later to Milan, where he frequented literary circles and became acquainted with Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Giacosa. With the short story Rosso Malpelo he inaugurated the Verist style, already partly anticipated in the novella Nedda. More distinctly Verist in character are two of the most important novels in Italian literature, I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889). In 1883 he published a collection of twelve short stories entitled Novelle rusticane. The work deepens the themes of Verismo, shifting attention from the analysis of passions (typical of Vita dei campi) to a more cynical and materialistic vision of reality.
Published as the concluding story of Novelle rusticane, the novella Beyond the Sea represents a particular moment in Verga’s literary production: here the writer softens the harsh and collective tone of the peasant world, allowing himself to be guided by the emotion of the landscape and the introspection of human feelings.
The story unfolds during a steamship voyage from Naples to Messina: on deck, while Sicily slowly emerges on the horizon at dawn, two unnamed young lovers experience an intense feeling destined to fade upon reaching land. Their anonymity makes them universal figures, symbols of an authentic love that cannot survive social conventions.
The Strait of Messina assumes a central significance: it is not merely a geographical space, but a boundary between the illusion of the journey and the reality awaiting them.
Within this setting, Verga invests Scilla with a meaning that goes beyond a simple topographical reference: the Calabrian promontory, a landmark for sailors, becomes the visible sign of the Strait itself and of the inevitable passage it represents.
Beside Scilla, the destiny of the two lovers is symbolically fulfilled, because that stretch of sea marks the end of their dream and of their love, and the return to concrete life, for beyond Scilla and the Strait lie responsibility and separation.
“At dawn they met again on deck. Her delicate little face seemed worn down by sleeplessness.
The breeze tousled her soft black hair.
Already Sicily was rising like a cloud on the horizon.
Then Etna suddenly lit up with gold and rubies, and the pale coastline split here and there into bays and dark promontories. On board, the bustle of the first morning service was beginning.
Passengers came up onto the deck one by one, pale, bewildered, wrapped up in various ways, chewing cigars and staggering about.
The crane began to creak, and the song of the night fell silent, as though startled and disoriented by all that movement.
Upon the turquoise and shining sea, great sails passed astern, swaying with the broad hulls that seemed empty, with only a few men aboard who shaded their eyes with their hands to watch the proud steamer go by.
Far off, other much smaller boats appeared as black dots, and the coasts were crowned with foam;
to the left Calabria, to the right the sandy Punta del Faro, Charybdis stretching its white arms towards rocky and haughty Scilla.
Suddenly, in the long line of coast that seemed unbroken, the Strait opened like a turquoise river, and beyond it the sea widened once more, boundless.”
Giuseppe Ribuffo
