200px, Matilde Serao, by "Rossi" Matilde Serao (; gr, Ματθίλδη Σεράο; 7 March 1856 – 25 July 1927) was an Italian

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

and

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

. She was the first woman called to edit an Italian newspaper, Il ''Corriere di Roma'' and later '' Il Giorno''. Serao was also the co-founder and editor of the newspaper ''

Il Mattino ''Il Mattino'' (meaning ''The Morning'' in English) is an Italian daily newspaper published in Naples, Italy. History and profile ''Il Mattino'' was first published on 16 March 1892 by the journalists Edoardo Scarfoglio and Matilde Serao. The p ...

'', and the author of several novels. She never won the Nobel Prize in Literature despite being nominated on six occasions.

Biography

Serao was born in the Greek city of Patras to an Italian father, Francesco Serao, and a

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

mother, Paolina Borely (or Bonelly). Her father had emigrated to Greece from

Naples Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...

for political reasons. In 1860 the family moved back to Italy, first to Carinola and then to Naples. Serao grew up in poverty and worked as a schoolmistress, an experience later described in the preface to a book of short stories called ''Leggende Napolitane'' (Napoletan Legends, 1881). She first gained notoriety after publishing her short stories in ''Il Piccolo'', a newspaper edited by Rocco de Zerbi and her first novel, ''Fantasia'' (Fantasy, 1883), which established her as an author capable of writing with sentiment and analytical subtleties. She spent the years between 1880 and 1886 in

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

, where she wrote her next five volumes of short stories and novels, all dealing with the struggles of ordinary people, and distinguished by great accuracy of observation and depth of insight: ''Cuore infermo'' (1881), ''Fior di passione'' (1883), ''La conquista di Roma'' (1885), ''La Virtù di checchina'' (1884), and ''Piccole anime'' (1883). With her husband,

Edoardo Scarfoglio Edoardo Scarfoglio (September 26, 1860 – October 6, 1917) was an Italian author and journalist, one of the early practitioners in Italian fiction of realism, a style of writing that embraced direct, colloquial language and rejected the more o ...

, she founded ''Il Corriere di Roma'', the first Italian attempt to model a daily journal along the lines of the Parisian press. The paper was short lived, and after its demise Serao established herself in Naples where she edited ''Il Corriere di Napoli''. In 1892 she co-founded ''

'' with her husband, which became the most important and most widely read daily paper of southern Italy. She established and ran her own newspaper, "Il Giorno" in 1904 until her death. The stress of a journalistic career in no way limited her literary activity; between 1890 and 1902 she produced ''Il paese di cuccagna'', ''Il ventre di Napoli'', ''Addio amore'', ''All'erta sentinella'', ''Castigo'', ''La ballerina'', ''Suor Giovanna della Croce'', ''Paese di Gesù'', novels in which the character of the people is rendered with sensitive power and sympathetic breadth of spirit. Most of these have been translated into English. The late nineteenth century English novelist

George Gissing George Robert Gissing (; 22 November 1857 – 28 December 1903) was an English novelist, who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best-known works have reappeared in modern editions. They include '' The Nether World'' (1889), '' New Gr ...

read three of her works in the original Italian between November 1894 and early January 1895, namely "Gli Amanti", "Cuore Infermo" and "Fantasia". Serao was a signatory of the 1925

Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, written by Benedetto Croce in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals by Giovanni Gentile, sanctioned the irreconcilable split between the philosopher and the Fascist government of B ...

. She was one of the contributors of the Fascist women's magazine, '' Lidel''. She died in 1927 in Naples.

Works in English translation

* ''Fantasy'' (1890) * ''Farewell Love'' (1890) * ''The Ballet Dancer and On Guard'' (1901) * ''In the Country of Jesus'' (1901) * ''The Land of Cockayne'' (1901) * ''The Conquest of Rome'' (1902) * ''After the Pardon'' (1909) * ''The Desire of Life'' (1911) * ''Souls Divided'' (1919) * ''The Severed Hand'' (1925) * ''The Harvest'' (1928) * ''Heart Conditions'' (2018)

References

Sources

External links

Matilde Serao
at the Women Film Pioneers Project * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Serao, Matilde 1856 births 1927 deaths Writers from Patras Italian people of Greek descent Italian women journalists 20th-century Italian novelists 19th-century Neapolitan people Italian newspaper editors Italian women editors Women film pioneers Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals Italian anti-fascists Women newspaper editors 20th-century Italian women writers 19th-century Italian women writers

Biography

Works in English translation

References

Further reading

Sources

External links