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.
Biography
Scarfoglio was born in Paganica, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, but lived and worked in Naples much of his life.[1] 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.[1]
As a writer of fiction, his early reputation rests on the novella The Trial of Phryne, published in 1884, a retelling—set in contemporary small-town Italy—of the trial of Phryne, a Greek courtesan from the fourth century, BCE. In Scarfoglio's version, a young woman, Mariantonia, guilty of murder, is acquitted simply because she is beautiful. Scarfoglio's tale is well known even to Italians who have not actually read the novella, since it was the basis for an episode in Alessandro Blasetti's popular 1952 film Altri tempi (In Olden Days), starring Gina Lollobrigida as Phryne/Mariantonia in the eighth, and last, episode bearing the title Il processo di Frine (Phryne’s Trial).[2]
On February 28, 1885 he married Matilde Serao, the best-known woman writer in Italy at the time, to avoid a scandal about the writer's pregnancy (later not carried to term).[1] With his wife he first founded and ran a newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma, in Rome (1886-87), 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 Scarfoglio and Serao moved to Naples where they edited Il Corriere di Napoli in 1888.[1] In 1892, they co-founded Il Mattino, which became the most important and most widely read daily paper of southern Italy.
From marriage four children were born. Scarfoglio, however, had extramarital adventures, including an affair that lasted for about a year with Gabrielle Bessard, a French singer, who, when he decided to break off the relationship in 1894, killed herself in front of his door, leaving him the child born of their relationship. The child, Pauline, was then raised in the family. The marriage and collaboration with Serao broke down in 1904.[1]
In 1904 he was called by the Florio family to direct L'Ora in Palermo. He made it an international newspaper, in line with the Florio family's interests, and agreements were made to exchange information with Le Matin in Paris, the Times in London and The Sun in New York.[3] Scarfoglio remained in Sicily until 1907, and subsequently returned to Naples and Il Mattino.
He and his wife were responsible for moving Naples into the mainstream of Italian journalism in the early twentieth century by serializing the works of writers such as D'Annunzio. As an editorialist in his own paper, Scarfoglio supported such policies as Italian expansionism in Africa and the Aegean in the 1890s. He is the father of journalists Carlo Scarfoglio and Antonio Scarfoglio. He died in Naples, following a heart attack, on 6 October 1917.[1]
^(in Italian)L'Ora: la sua storia, Agave (Contributo allo studio delle fonti della storia dell'arte in Italia nel Novecento - Università degli Studi di Palermo)
