Edoardo Scarfoglio

Edoardo Scarfoglio (26 September 1860 – 6 October 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 ornate style of earlier Italian literature. His name is chiefly associated with the newspaper Il Mattino in Naples, which he owned and edited for many years, and still is the largest daily newspaper in the city.

Early life and career

Scarfoglio was born in Paganica, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, but lived and worked in Naples much of his life. His father, Michele Scarfoglio, was a magistrate of Calabrian origin and his mother, Marianna Volpe, was of Abruzzese origin. He had a difficult school career due to his rebellious temperament and after repeating several classes at a high school in Chieti, he was sent to Rome to his uncle Carlo, to study at the prestigious Ennio Quirino Visconti Liceo Ginnasio.

He enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1880 and began to participate in the capital's cultural life. In 1881, he began collaborating with Cronaca Byzantina, on which authors of the calibre of Giosue Carducci, Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana and Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote, and, in the same year, he joined the editorial staff of Capitan Fracassa, a Roman daily founded in 1880 by Luigi Arnaldo Vassallo. Frequenting these circles was the turning point for Scarfoglio's career, both personal and professional. The editorial offices were considered privileged literary salons around which orbited the most illustrious names of the new national culture: here he met Matilde Serao, who shortly afterwards became his wife.