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Verismo (meaning "realism", from Italian vero, meaning "true") was an Italian literary and, by...

Verismo (meaning "realism", from Italian vero, meaning "true") was an Italian literary and, by extension, operatic movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s. It was mainly inspired by French naturalism. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents and the authors of a verismo manifesto. Unlike French naturalism, which was based on positivistic ideals, Verga and Capuana rejected claims of the scientific nature and social usefulness of the movement. Italian verists were pessimistic and based their work on the premise of impersonality, meaning that the writer should not impose any personal meaning or point of view on his works, which should seem as if they were 'written by themselves'. Verismo is also used to refer to a post-Romantic Italian operatic tradition associated with composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, and Giacomo Puccini, who advocated bringing the naturalism of writers such as Emile Zola and Henrik Ibsen into opera. Internationally the term is more widely understood to refer to a style of Italian opera that marked its origin in 1890 with Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and lasted into the early twentieth century.