The Conquest of Rome by Matilde Serao

MATILDE SERAO THE CONQUEST OF ROME MATILDE SERAO THE CONQUEST OF ROME Edited by ANN CAESAR PICKERING S^CHATTO 1991 Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. Copyright © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 1991 Introduction and notes to this edition copyright © Ann Caesar 1991 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85196 025 2 0 This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Converted to digital print, 2002 INTRODUCTION The Neapolitan writer, Matilde Serao, began to work on The Conquest of Rome in 1884 when she was 27 years old. She had left Naples for Rome in the autumn of 1881, when she was offered a post as journalist for one of the capital's major newspapers. She had high hopes that this, her fourth novel, but the first to be set in Rome, would bring her recognition as a writer of national importance. Moreover by developing her tale of unrequited love in the context of the city's social and parliamentary life, she was free to draw on her experience as a journalist and observer of Roman life. Her choice of protagonist, Francesco Sangiorgio, an aspiring young politician from the Basilicata (one of the poorest regions of Southern Italy), and of subject-matter, his brief but eventful parliamentary career, allowed her to recast within a fictional framework her own impressions of the city that she had moved to as an outsider three years earlier. For Sangiorgio, an ambitious young man without social connections or private means, a parliamentary career offers a way of escaping a narrow and stultifying background. Serao, with the additional burden of being born female, eschewed the idea that she should become a school-teacher, in favour of the less orthodox profession of journalism. Throughout her life journalism was to remain her principal source of income, for although she was to be one of Italy's first best-selling novelists with over forty volumes of stories and novels to her name, publishing did not provide a livelihood. The Conquest of Rome, which was serialized in a magazine called Don Chisciotte before appearing as a book in 1885, received a mixed press, but as the title implies, Serao's determination to make literary and cultural Rome sit up and take note was vindicated. Where in her novel, Francesco Sangiorgio vi Matilde Serao lets his emotional life play havoc with his aspirations and dreams, Matilde Serao's own gritty determination, appetite for hard work and spirited fight ensured the personal success that she denied her protagonist. 1. MATILDE SERAO: HER LIFE AND WRITING Matilde Serao was born in Patras, Greece in 1857, only child of an exiled Italian father and a Greek mother. Her father, along with many Italian patriots hostile to the Bourbon dynasty, had been forced to flee his home-town, Naples, after its autocratic ruler Ferdinand II had successfully suppressed the popular liberal uprising of 1848. The dynasty was finally overthrown in 1861 when Italy (with the exception of Venice and Papal Rome, the latter not incorporated until 1870) became a unified state with King Vittorio Emanuele II as its constitutional head. It was in that same year that Matilde, aged three, returned to Italy with her parents. Her childhood was spent in relative poverty in a working-class district of Naples. As her journalist father worked only occasionally, the struggle to support the family fell on her mother's shoulders. A well-educated Greek woman of (idlcate health, she gave private language lessons at home. The relationship between mother and daughter was very close; Matilde remembered her mother as an 'extremely cultured, intelligent, angelic' woman,' and she was devastated by her early death in 1879 which left Matilde with the added responsibility of main- taining her idle and somewhat feckless father. Matilde took a diploma that qualified her as a primary school-teacher, but it was a career she did not pursue. She chose instead to work at the offices of the State Telegraph Service where from 1876 to 1878, between despatching one telegraph and the next, she managed to write a collection of stories and her first novel. In this period she was also working as a free-lance journalist using whatever contacts her father could provide. Her fighting spirit and determination to succeed as both journalist and novelist emerge clearly in the following extract from a letter written in this period. Introduction vii I am in good physical health. As for morale, I am in a period of such feverish production that it is alarming: I am writing everywhere and on everything, with an extraordinary audacity, I am winning my place by dint of pushing and shoving, with the absolute burning determination to get there without anybody helping me, or hardly anybody. But you know that I don't listen to the weaknesses of my sex and I keep going as if I were a young man.1 The move to Rome in 1881 signified much more than a change of city, it meant a change in status and, with it, some financial security. From being one journalist among thousands, scrabbling around for poorly-paid work she was offered a place on the editorial board of the Roman newspaper Capitan Fracassa, a post offering status and a salary. Capitan Fracassa was the most professional and polemical of the numerous papers that appeared on the streets as a response to Rome's new-found status as Italy's political and administrative centre. For Matilde, it was also a personal triumph that a position with some security and prestige was offered to a woman. The quality of her work and the professionalism with which she approached her assign- ments ensured that she had few difficulties in establishing herself as a journalist, and as the salary was not adequate to keep her and her father, she freelanced for other periodicals at the same time. Her brief at Capitan Fracassa was to Write two thousand lines a month on anything and everything - Franco- Russian relationships, town-planning, book reviews, the monar- chy, fashion and furnishings, social Darwinism. She loved the hurly-burly of journalism: 'I have the spirit of a gladiator, I need the circus'. Nonetheless her main motive behind the move to Rome was to establish herself nationally as a novelist. One effect of Italy's history was the extent to which cultural life was still regionally based, so although Serao was beginning to acquire a reputation as a novelist in Naples, two hundred and twenty kilometres away in Rome her name was unknown. It was with this ambition in mind that she began work on La conquista di Roma (The Conquest of Rome). The importance she gave the project is clear from the care with which she prepared the ground. viii Matilde Serao At the beginning of June 1884, Matilde wrote to a close friend and admirer Count Primoli (from whom she had once hoped for an offer of marriage), requesting a loan of one thousand lire to be repaid in October. The money would allow her a sabbatical from her other commitments so that she could work on her manuscript without interruption. In her letter to Primoli she points out that 'my literary reputation and much of my future depends5 on this book. The money was forthcoming and a week later Serao was to be found in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament 'letting the ambience seep into me'. The field-work completed, in late July of the same year she left Rome for Francavilla al Mare in the Abbruzzi, where in the company of other writers and artists she began work. Her description of the circle she found herself in, 'the youngest, the strongest, the most intellectual centre of Italy', suggests in its exuberance (it bore little relationship to reality), that she felt she was now accepted in the circles to which she had once aspired. Her letters to Primoli describe an idyllic life of writing, swimming, eating, reading and talking, but she had private preoccupations. A cholera epidemic was sweeping through Naples and Primoli helped her organise her father's departure from the city and found somewhere for him to live. More worrying, however, for her was the fact that she was pregnant and suffering acute nausea. The father of the baby was fellow-journalist and writer, Edoardo Scarfoglio, who was one of the company at Francavilla al Mare that summer. Characteris- tically, with iron resolve, despite sickness and anxiety about her future, she completed her manuscript on time. A few months later Matilde Serao and Edoardo Scarfoglio married. Their wedding and the furnishings for their future home, decorated according to Gabriele D'Annunzio in the style 'd'un artiste au siecle XIXe' left them penniless, Scarfoglio himself was 24 when they married, an opposition journalist from the South, with good looks, charm and charisma. In private life his numerous infidelities never ceased to be a source of anguish for Serao, but in public life they worked together and made a formidable team. Later that year they set up their own Introduction ix paper Corriere di Roma and although it brought with it many headaches — dealing with the debtors, printers, suppliers and journalists while continuing to write and raise four children — it did nonetheless also bring Matilde the gratification of knowing that she was now a newspaper proprietress.

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