In 1868 he went to study in Florence; then he was in Rome from where he sent paintings of a historical character to Bologna. In 1871 he won a competition for the curtain of the “Teatro Gentile” in Fabriano. In 1875 he was in Venice, then again in Rome where he painted in the apse of S. Maria della Vittoria a large fresco with the Triumphant Entry of Catholics into Prague and several paintings including S. Giovanni Nepomuceno for S. Giovanni in Laterano, S. Bonaventura and S. Francesco in the Galleria d’Arte moderna, and the Coronation on the staircase of S. Carlo ai Catinari, now in Florence, in the local Galleria d’arte moderna. Returning to Bologna, he frescoed (1886) on the vault of the hall of the Provincial Council the Irnerio which glosses the ancient laws, his last work.
A most acute and incisive draughtsman, with a precision almost mathematical, by which he achieves effects almost stereoscopic, Serra constantly felt the nostalgia for a colour equally vivid and effective. But since he always conceived colour as a separate element, divorced from drawing, his paintings, though bright and lively in hue, sometimes almost porcelain-like, lack chromatic vitality, as a drawing almost always clearly outlined with dark or violet lines restricts the fields of colour, stifling any vivification.