# What is the best 19th-century Italian novel?

> Risorgimento epics, Sicilian verismo, Trieste introspection and decadent Roman salons, all from the century that taught Italy how to write a novel.

*By YPB Team · Published October 29, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-19th-century-italian-novel*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **I Malavoglia** — score 1000/1000
   Giovanni Verga's 1881 verismo masterpiece about a Sicilian fishing family at Aci Trezza undone by one bad bargain.
2. **Fosca** — score 850/1000
   Iginio Ugo Tarchetti's 1869 Scapigliatura novel of a soldier bound to a sickly, possessive woman, later Sondheim's Passion.
3. **I promessi sposi** — score 560/1000
   Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827, revised 1842), the story of Renzo and Lucia in plague-stricken Lombardy and the founding novel of modern Italian prose.
4. **Il Corsaro Nero** — score 560/1000
   Emilio Salgari's 1898 swashbuckler of a Piedmontese noble turned Caribbean pirate seeking vengeance.
5. **Il piacere** — score 560/1000
   Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1889 decadent novel of the aesthete Andrea Sperelli adrift among the salons of Rome.
6. **Storia di una capinera** — score 560/1000
   Verga's 1871 epistolary novel of a young girl forced into a convent, his first big popular success.
7. **Le confessioni d'un italiano** — score 560/1000
   Ippolito Nievo's posthumous 1867 memoir-novel of an octogenarian looking back on Italy's journey from Venetian Republic to Risorgimento.
8. **Demetrio Pianelli** — score 485/1000
   Emilio De Marchi's 1890 novel of a humble Milanese clerk who quietly sacrifices himself for his brother's family.
9. **L'innocente** — score 485/1000
   D'Annunzio's 1892 psychological novel narrated by a husband confessing to a crime born of jealousy.
10. **Ettore Fieramosca** — score 397/1000
   Massimo d'Azeglio's 1833 patriotic novel built around the 1503 Challenge of Barletta.
11. **Le avventure di Pinocchio** — score 291/1000
   Carlo Collodi's 1883 tale of the wooden puppet who longs to become a real boy, one of the most translated books ever written.
12. **Senilità** — score 291/1000
   Svevo's 1898 novel of a Trieste clerk's self-deceiving affair, championed later by James Joyce.
13. **I Viceré** — score 291/1000
   Federico De Roberto's 1894 saga of the Uzeda princes of Catania, adapting to Italian unification without changing at all.
14. **Piccolo mondo antico** — score 291/1000
   Antonio Fogazzaro's 1895 novel of a marriage tested by faith and grief on Lake Lugano under Austrian rule.
15. **Una vita** — score 291/1000
   Italo Svevo's 1892 debut about Alfonso Nitti, a bank clerk in Trieste paralysed by his own inertia.
16. **Mastro-don Gesualdo** — score 0/1000
   Verga's 1889 portrait of a peasant-born builder who climbs into wealth but never into belonging.
17. **Cuore** — score 0/1000
   Edmondo De Amicis's 1886 school-year diary of a Turin boy, the book that taught generations of Italians civic virtue.
18. **Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis** — score 0/1000
   Ugo Foscolo's 1802 epistolary novel of a young patriot's despair after Napoleon hands Venice to Austria.

Tags: books, italy, classics, fiction, 19th century