Matilde Serao

Matilde Serao (Italian pronunciation: [maˈtilde seˈraːo]; Greek: Ματθίλδη Σεράο; 14 March 1856 – 25 July 1927) was an Italian journalist, novelist, publisher and newspaper editor. She was the first woman appointed to edit an Italian newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma and later Il Giorno. Serao was also the co-founder and editor of the Naples-based newspaper Il Mattino, 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 Patras, Greece to an Italian father, Francesco Serao, and a Greek mother, Paolina Borely (or Bonelly). Her father, a journalist, had emigrated to Greece from Naples 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 her collection of short stories Leggende Napolitane (Napoletan Legends, 1881). She first gained notoriety after publishing short stories in Il Piccolo, a newspaper edited by Rocco de Zerbi. Her first novel, Fantasia (Fantasy, 1883), was well received, and Serao was hailed as an author capable of writing with sentiment and analytical subtleties.

Serao spent the years between 1880 and 1886 in Rome, where she wrote 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).