Andrea Verga

In the same period, he participated with Giulio Carcano, Cesare Correnti, and other young patriots in the "Strenna Il Presagio", in which he published the short story La Fatua (1836).

[2][3] In 1842, he moved to Milan, where he found employment in the private asylum Villa Antonini (hospice of San Celso), of which in 1847 he was promoted to "assistant director", then beginning his study of mental alienation.

He also undertook the practice of general medicine, surgery, and anatomical exercises at the Ospedale Maggiore, collaborating with the new medical journal of Milan, founded by his friend Agostino Bertani and directed by Panizza.

He wrote his beliefs about the Stabilimenti Pei Pazzi, a matter he previously discussed in the Gazzetta Medica of Milan with the title of Historical notes on the establishments of the madmen in Lombardy.

[2][4] In 1864, Verga then transformed the psychiatric appendix into an independent journal, the Italian Archive for nervous diseases and more particularly for mental insanities, directing it together with friends and colleagues Cesare Castiglioni and Serafino Biffi.

In 1874, at the Congress of the Society in Imola, the classification of mental illnesses proposed by him was approved, which made it possible to standardize the statistical surveys on the pathologies present in Italian asylums.

[2][4] After having founded the Society of Patronage for the Mad Poor of the Province of Milan in 1874, on 16 November 1876, he was appointed senator, on the proposal of his friend Correnti and with the support of Prime Minister Agostino Depretis.

Verga's correspondents include numerous doctors, psychiatrists, naturalists and exponents of the scientific world of the nineteenth century, such as Agostino Bertani,[6] Leonardo Bianchi, Serafino Biffi, Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, Gabriele Buccola, Carlo Cantoni, Filippo De Filippi, Camillo Golgi, Carlo Livi, Cesare Lombroso, Paolo Mantegazza, Scipion Pinel, Augusto Tamburini, Augusto Tebaldi, Tito Vignoli.

The archive also includes a substantial core consisting of medical and scientific writings: notes, observations, manuscripts, drafts and other printed material, which testify the path of studies, the period of the assistantship at the chair of anatomy of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Pavia and the subsequent career of the alienist as a doctor and psychiatrist.

Andrea Verga's archive is kept in the Civic Historical Collections of the Municipality of Milan, from which it was purchased in 1992 on the antiques market, after a long period of stay with the heirs.

As noted by Marco Soresina, the Verga archive is the result of "successive stratifications": to the small group of papers written by Bartolomeo Panizza, many documentation has been added.

Papers also testify to his interest in literature and poetic composition: odes, songs, sonnets, satires, short stories and epistles in verse, fables in Italian, Latin and dialect.