"Illustrious Maestro, I don't know how to express the joy I feel in receiving your precious letter. Giovanni Verga! The author of Cavalleria Rusticana and Mastro Don Gesualdo ! Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am a poor amateur of letters. The worries of bureaucracy occupy the best hours of my day. In the evening, I gather myself in the tranquility of my paternal family and try to capture some ghost on paper. L'Esilio is a work of extreme youth. Someone who is over thirty should not have published it: having published it, he certainly should not have sent it to a great man like you. A Marinetti wanted it... In any case, if you read it, please forgive me and have the supreme kindness to remember me, sometimes, as one of your most devoted and affectionate disciples. Yours, Paolo Buzzi ." (Milan, 13 November 1906).

“Illustrious Companion, I am sending you the recipe for Margherita Cake. The cream: place 50 grams of cocoa in a saucepan with 200 grams of very finely powdered sugar and half a cup of water. Once everything is well melted to a creamy consistency by bringing it to a gentle boil, remove the saucepan from the heat and add 200 grams of butter. Melt the butter, again without heat, and place the cream in a cool place to set. Then prepare the cake…” (from Agatina Boscarino, who writes to Verga, signing herself “Your friend and Comare” on August 25, 1910).

What do the great Futurist writer Paolo Buzzi, one of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's closest collaborators and an active participant in spreading Futurist ideas in the early years of the movement, and Comare Agatina Boscarino have in common? The fact that they coexist comfortably within the family archive of a great writer like Giovanni Verga . A personal archive that, as always, reveals unknown cultural and human treasures. The hundreds of testimonies of affection and admiration, jealously preserved here, deserve to be studied analytically. From the poet's request for recommendations at the beginning to letters of complete admiration for the writer, this entire archive testifies to Verga's extraordinary success with the vast Italian public . Not just experts, but ordinary readers, who dared to write to the author of Cavalleria Rusticana hoping for a response, which promptly arrived. It was also a way for Verga to gauge the mood of the "people," to perceive the concrete meaning of his writing for the public, expecting from it approval and sometimes criticism. Among them are various accounting documents, both administrative and otherwise. These too are invaluable in reconstructing phases of Verga's professional life, tangibly determining the commercial success of his works, starting with Cavalleria Rusticana .
A small portion of his personal archive recommended not only for scholars of Verga's work but also for anyone wishing to reconstruct the social life and economic relations of a great intellectual of the late nineteenth century. He was skilled at managing his growing fortune, which also derived from his art.