D. H. Lawrence said that Sicily in the mid 1800s was "the poorest place in Europe. A Sicilian peasant might live through his whole life without ever possessing as much as a dollar." Giovanni Verga, one of the greatest writers Italy ever produced, grew up in the circumstances Lawrence describes. In Little Novels of Sicily, first published in 1883, he poignantly re-creates the beautiful simplicity of Sicilian village life. In this collection, Verga seasons the grim lives of fishermen and farmers with comic elements, and evokes the mystical pleasures of the landscape in which he was born and to which he returned late in life.