Abstract

The paper contributes to the reconstruction of Giovanni Verga's large collection of letters, a complete national edition of which is not yet available. The author examines two unpublished letters that have been recently acquired by the municipal Historical Archive of Catania, Verga's hometown. The analysis focuses on the orthographical and morphological variations, on the dialectal interferences and the syntactical particularities of Verga's language. Lastly, three of his autographic letters are compared with their transcriptions, in the version already published by three scholars who deeply studied the work of the Sicilian writer.