"La Lupa" is one of a series of short stories about peasant life in Sicily published by Giovanni Verga between March and July 1880.
Upon publication, Vita dei Campi was "moderately well received", with reviewers recognising "a new voice speaking in an original way about a world strikingly different from the urban society whose mores preoccupied French realist authors".
[1] Writing in Modern Language Notes, Gregory L. Lucente stated "at its appearance 'La Lupa' was regarded as so strikingly realistic to be utterly unlike its predecessors in nineteenth-century Italian fiction".
"[4] In the early-1890s, Pietro Mascagni set a libretto to Verga's short story "Cavalleria rusticana", producing a highly successful opera of the same name.
[5] Puccini abandoned the project in 1894 following a discussion with Blandine von Bülow (the stepdaughter of Richard Wagner),[6] having concerns over the "dialogicity" of the libretto and the "unpleasant characters, without one single luminous, sympathetic figure".