Federico De Roberto
1861–1927
Biography
Federico De Roberto was an Italian novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He was born in Naples on 16 January 1861, but he moved to Catania as a child and lived there for nearly all of his life. His first work was done in the newsrooms of the national press, and there he came across Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, the major names of the verismo school; Verga later opened the doors of Milan's literary world to him. Like his older colleagues he studied how character is shaped, but he gave more weight to the illusions people build for themselves.
His early books were collections of short stories, among them La sorte (1887), Documenti umani (1888) and Processi verbali (1890), along with the novels Ermanno Raeli (1889) and L'illusione (1891). His best-known work is I Viceré (The Viceroys), published in 1894. It follows the Uzeda princes, a fictional noble family of Catania with Spanish origins, through the last year of Bourbon rule and the opening decades of the Kingdom of Italy, as old privilege gives way to parliamentary politics. It was not a success when it appeared, and De Roberto went back to journalism, writing for the Corriere della Sera among other papers. He died in Catania in July 1927.
The Viceroys moves among many voices rather than a single point of view, in the verismo manner that Italians knew as their form of literary naturalism. The novel influenced later writers, among them Pirandello and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard. The book on this site, Gli amori, is a different kind of work. Published in Milan in 1898, it collects twenty-nine stories about love, many of them framed as letters from a narrator to a witty and offended countess. They trace suspicion, jealousy and devotion in a cool, ironic voice, and show the psychological eye that runs through his short fiction from the 1880s on.
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Books
Gli amori
by Federico De Roberto
Twenty-nine stories about love, most of them framed as letters from the narrator to a witty and offended countess. De Roberto dissects suspicion, jealousy, vanity and devotion in a cool, ironic voice, from a first silent understanding to letters of farewell.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.