Read Matilde Serao and find yourself in Italy at the end of the 19th century

The investigations, the novels, the Nobel failure due to anti-fascism: a portrait of Donna Matilde, who when she began to speak “imposed herself on everyone” without needing to “prophet and predominate”. Underrated at home, Henry James dedicated an essay to the “great romantic writer”

Before the Great War Edith Whartonelegant and very snobbish American now at home in Paris, he met Matilde Serao in Madame Fitz-James’ drawing room. The author of “The Age of Innocence”, a novel that earned her the Pulitzer in 1921, referred to it in a memoir published by her in 1934. In a page of rare perfidy and reflected intellectual honesty, Matilde Serao appears there as the “by far most notable” personality among the women met in that drawing room. But, together, it is the picturesque character that the landlady exhibits as “an incomparable number for her entertainments”. At that time, Donna Matilde went to Paris every year to promote the translation of her novels. And there she had several friends, including Count Gégé Primoli, a relative of Napoleon, and the writers Paul Bourget and Anatole France. It was during one of these trips of hers that Edith Wharton saw her and described how “a squat, fat woman, red in the face and neck, sinking between round, cushioned shoulders”. Her black hair, she noted, was “laborily styled like that of a Neapolitan peasant woman and looked like a wig. She was of indefinable age, although the fact that she was accompanied by a little daughter in her own short skirts made her think she was under fifty. The bizarre half-Spanish figure of her was similar to Velasquez’s las Meninas ”. Always in low-cut robes, she wore one “of scarlet silk, trimmed with black lace, on which her short arms and plump hands rested like those of a cherub on a setting cloud. With those clothes and those offensive colors, she appeared an incongruous figure, in that living room where everything was in semi-darkness and in semitones ”. But here is the ungainly and ill-dressed menina, decorated with offensive colors, transform under the incredulous eyes of Wharton. Because when Serao began to speak “he imposed himself on everyone”. And she didn’t need to “prophet” and “predominate”, what interested her was “communicating with intelligent people”. About her Her profession as a journalist “had provided her with a rough and ready knowledge of life and an experience of public affairs totally lacking in drawing-room Corinne which she surpassed in wit and eloquence”. Donna Matilde stood out for her “manly sense of fair play” and when she was invited to speak “then her monologues reached peaks that I have never seen in the speech of any other woman”. In her, concludes Wharton, “culture and experience were fused in the brilliance of a strong intellect”.