Daly, Selena; (2019) Fallen women in the galleria: Giovanni verga and the nineteenth-century milanese shopping arcade. Italian Studies , 74 (1) pp. 44-56. 10.1080/00751634.2019.1532638.

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Abstract

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built between 1865 and 1867, is the heart of the Lombard capital. Giovanni Verga, a resident of the city for twenty years, was the Galleria’s most faithful and consistent chronicler in his Milanese short stories. While his contemporaries tended to portray the Galleria as a melting pot, Verga depicted it as home to two distinct categories of people: aspiring artists and fallen women. He employed these figures and the space of the Galleria as a means to reflect on and grapple with his anxieties about the changing position of women in late nineteenth-century Italian society. I argue that Verga chose to pathologise the space of the Galleria to warn ‘respectable’ women off and to maintain highly gendered conceptions of public and private realms. This article thus explores Verga’s representation of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II between 1875 and 1892, with an emphasis on the gendered dynamics of movement in this temple of consumerism.

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