CAPUANA, Luigi. – Writer, born in Mineo on 28 May 1839, died in Catania on 29 November 1915. He studied in Mineo at Jesuit schools, then from 1850 he spent three years at the college in Bronte. At the University of Catania he attended the faculty of law, but suspended his studies in the second year and moved to Florence as a theatre critic for *La Nazione*. In 1872 he accepted the position of mayor of Mineo; in 1877 he was in Milan, collaborating with *Corriere della Sera* and literary journals, and cultivated friendships with Giovanni Verga, Emilio Zola, and Gabriele d’Annunzio.
Of a temperament inclined to irony, he mocked Pietro Vetro by having some of his dialectal verses included in the *Raccolta amplissima dei canti popolari*; even Alessandro D’Ancona discussed the verse of the unknown Sicilian poet(!) “Donni c’aviti ‘ntelletu d’amuri.” Like Carducci, Capuana also clashed with M. Rapisardi (cf. *Paradisi: Giobbe, Lucifero* with a preface by Giulio Salvadori, Catania 1884). He taught at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero in Rome and, from 1902 until his death, at the University of Catania in the chair of Lessinography and stylistics. Notable are his critical writings (*Studi della letteratura contemporanea*, Milan 1880; *Gli ismi contemporanei*, Catania 1898; *Libri e teatro*, ibid. 1892), which adhere to the manner and method of De Sanctis in the examination of works. In his novels and short stories he embraced and developed the theory of an impersonal art at the service of science, advocating harmony and fusion between the two. Seeking above all the truth, he analysed cases of hysterical fits in *Profumo*, pathological cases of morbid love in *Giacinta*, spiritualistic evocations in *Il marchese di Roccaverdina*, aspects of telepathy in the novel *La sfinge*, and groups of maniacs and strange beings in *Le paesane* and *Le nuove paesane*. In these investigations, which range from naturalism to verism to experimentalism, his art, modelled on Zola and Balzac, becomes exaggerated; no moral concern remains, as Capuana is solely preoccupied with art. Important too is his dialectal production and literature for children; worth recalling is his satire of 19th-century ideologies in *Il re burlesco* (Florence 1905). Capuana exerted a notable influence on his generation, even if in him one senses too much curiosity about psychology and natural science (B. Croce).