Giovanni Carmelo Verga di Fontanabianca (Italian: [dʒoˈvanni karˈmɛːlo ˈverɡa]; 2 September 1840 – 27 January 1922) was an Italian realist (verista) writer. His novels I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) are widely recognized as masterpieces. Verga has been called the greatest Italian novelist after Manzoni. D. H. Lawrence translated several of his works into English.

The first son of Giovanni Battista Catalano Verga and Caterina Di Mauro, Verga was born into a prosperous family of Catania in Sicily. He began writing in his teens, producing the historical novel Amore e Patria (Love and Homeland) when he was only 16 years old. Although nominally studying law at the University of Catania, he used money his father had given him to publish his I carbonari della montagna (The Carbonari of the Mountain) in 1861 and 1862. This was followed by Sulle lagune (On the Lagoons) in 1863.

A first turning point in Verga's career came with a visit to Florence in 1865, during which he wrote Una peccatrice (Eng. trans. A mortal sin, 1995). Unlike his previous works, this was not a patriotic, historical novel, but a novel about romantic love. The hero, an artist, falls in love with a femme fatale; he becomes a success and wins her, but once the woman is his, he tires of her and eventually she kills herself. Plainly Verga's attention had shifted from society and political passions to the passions of the individual.

Meanwhile, Verga had been serving in the Catania National Guard (1860–64), after which he travelled to Florence several times, settling there in 1869. Important personalities stayed in this city, and the cultural debate on subjects such as physiology, positivism, and Darwinism was lively. Francesco Dall'Ongaro, who belonged to the older Romantic generation, took him under his wing, and suggested he write about the plight of a girl obliged to become a nun. The result was the highly successful epistolary novel Storia di una capinera (Eng. trans. Sparrow, 2008), published in 1871. Verga moves away from schoolbook rhetoric and assumes the ingenuous tone of a young girl, Maria, writing to a friend. Furthermore, as later with verismo, the determining motivations are economic. Maria's father, a widower, marries again and leaves his daughter without a dowry or inheritance, both being set aside for the new stepsister, whilst the only option for Maria is to become a nun. Maria falls in love with a young man, but he pursues his own financial interests and abandons her for the stepsister. Maria has now no escape from the nunnery; she goes mad and dies.

Whilst still in Florence, Verga began to be influenced by the Scapigliatura, as is evident from Eva (1873). The theme of this novel, which played a vital role in his development as an author, is the fate of art in modern society, particularly in relation to economic factors. Eva is a dancer who sells her art to the public. The painter Enrico Lanti, in order to succeed financially, must also abandon his romantic ideals and learn to produce a vulgar form of art, which is the only sort that the public likes. When Enrico convinces Eva to live with him in poverty in a garret, she loses the appeal given her by the stage and wealth. After their separation, Enrico tries to get her back and is wounded in a duel with her new lover. Totally defeated, he returns to Sicily to await death.

In 1872 Verga settled in Milan and had direct contact with Scapigliatura writers. In this period this city was the most modern one of the peninsula, economic capital and home to the main newspapers and major publishing houses to come into contact with modernity. He became assiduous with the most famous Milanese cultural circles, such as the salon of Countess Clara Maffei. He befriended unruly writers and teamed up at the Cova café with authors, publishers and literary critics. His next novels, Tigre reale (1874) and Eros (1875), are typical Scapigliato products. In both, a contrast is drawn between the false, cynical life of the urban upper classes and family virtues embodied in a female character. However, also in 1874, he wrote ‘Nedda’, a novella with a Sicilian setting, which is in a much more realist vein than anything else he had so far written, though the narrative impersonality which will distinguish his verismo is still absent. It tells the story of a poor olive-gatherer and her love for a young peasant, Janu, who dies when she is pregnant with his child. Abandoned by everyone, Nedda has to watch her baby daughter die in dire poverty.

In 1877 Verga published a collection of his stories—all either late Romantic or Scapigliato in manner—as Primavera e altri racconti. At the end of the same year, his most important friend, the Sicilian writer and critic Luigi Capuana, also settled in Milan. The two were deeply impressed by Zola's L'Assommoir, also published that year, and decided to take it as a literary model. Thus, in late 1877 and early 1878, as a result of the encounter with French Naturalism, verismo came into being as an avant-garde movement aiming to create the modern novel which Verga and Capuana felt Italy lacked. They made it a prerequisite that the writer should assume a scientific stance, as proposed by contemporary positivism; reality should furnish inspiration and the work of literature should be a document created with the impersonality that had already been theorized in France by Flaubert and Zola.

The first example of the new manner was ‘Rosso Malpelo’, a story written between spring and summer 1878 about an orphan boy who works as a miner and is tormented by everyone else (including, it seems, the narrative voice) on the grounds that his red hair signals an evil character. It was included in Vita dei campi (1880), a collection of novelle with Sicilian peasant settings. This is Verga's first work of verismo and includes other famous stories such as ‘Jeli il pastore’, ‘La lupa’, ‘Fantasticheria’ (Daydreaming), and ‘Pentolaccia’ (The Plaything). It also included ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ ("Rustic Chivalry"), which he adapted for the theatre - and later formed the basis for several opera librettos, including Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Gastaldon's Mala Pasqua! Another novella, ‘L'amante di Gramigna’, opens with a brief exposition of the theory of verismo.