Federico de Roberto

• Name — Federico De Roberto • Born — 16 January 1861 • Birthplace — Naples, Kingdom of Italy • Died — 26 August 1927 • Place of death — Catania, Kingdom of Italy • Occupation — Novelist, journalist • Movement — Verismo • Notable Works — The Viceroys

Born in Naples, he moved as a child with his family to Catania, where he lived practically all of his life. He began his writing career working as a journalist for national newspapers, where he met Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, the most prominent writers of the Verismo movement. Verga introduced him into the literary circles of Milan. Like Capuana and Verga, De Robertohe too observed the psychological makeup of his characters in the light of the positivist science of his times. But in contrast to his older contemporaries, he emphasized less the power of human passions and desires than their relation to an inner world of illusion and deception in which, he believed, they originated. His collections of short stories, La sorte (1887), Documenti umani (1888), Processi verbali (1890), and L'albero della scienza (1890), all explore the psychological dimension of his characters' actions. His first novel, Ermanno Raeli (1889), is largely autobiographical, while L'illusione (1891) is devoted to a female protagonist and her illusion of love. In 1894 his novel The Viceroys (I Viceré) was published. It was the result of years of hard work, but obtained little success upon its release. Disillusionment and nervous disorders induced De Roberto to resume journalistic work: he became a writer for the Corriere della Sera and the Giornale d'Italia. Only later, after some experience as a playwright, he returned to the novel, with L'Imperio (1908–1913), an unfinished sequel to I Viceré. The novel concentrated on the public and political life of Rome, viewed through the life of the reactionary Prince Consalvo, who, at the conclusion of The Viceroys, was elected to parliament by popular vote. In L'imperio, De Roberto takes his negative perspective to the extreme point of social and political nihilism. He died in Catania on 26 July 1927, at age 66.

De Roberto's 1894 novel consists of three parts and is based upon the story of the fictional Uzeda princes of Francalanza, a noble family of Catania of Spanish origins. This family served as viceroys during the previous Spanish rule of the Kingdom of Sicily. The plot, focusing on the social and political background of the time, follows the private history of the Uzedas during the last year of Bourbon domination in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the first decades of the Kingdom of Italy, portraying the transition from feudalism to a parliamentary system. De Roberto uses the literary style of verismo (the Italian expression of literary Naturalism) and adopts no privileged point of view (neither the narrator's nor any other's), but instead displays a plurality of voices. The novel influenced Pirandello's I vecchi e i giovani and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard. It was adapted to cinema by director Roberto Faenza in 2007.

• (essays, criticism) • (posthumous publication)

* •, reprinted Milan: Aldo Garzanti, 1959; published in English as The Viceroys, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962, translated by Archibald Colquhoun. • (posthumous publication)

• Edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscarà. Catania: Tringale. 1978. • Edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscarà. Rome: Bulzoni. 1979. • Critical edition edited by Teresa Volpe. Rome: Aracne Editrice. 2013.

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• Il Rosario (1912) • La tormenta (1918, never staged) – dramatic treatment of Spasimo (Agony) from 1897 • La strada maestra (1913, never staged) – dramatic treatment of La messa di nozze from 1911

Federico de Roberto is recorded as writer and literary critic.

• (2nd edition) Milan: Libreria editrice Galli. 1892. (3rd edition) Milan: Fratelli Treves. 1910. (4th edition) Milan: Fratelli Treves. 1919. • (2nd edition) Milan: Fratelli Treves. 1890 (4th edition) Milan: Libreria editrice Galli. 1896. (7th edition) Milan: Galli, Baldini & Castoldi. 1898. * * *