SERRA, RENATO
Critic and man of letters, born at Cesena on 5 Dec. 1884, killed on the Podgora on 20 July 1915.
In 1908 he taught at the Normal School in Cesena; the following year he became director of the Malatesta and Piana Libraries. In a brief and shadowed life, the pursuit of letters was for S. an unceasing labour of *humanitas*, a kind of religion which he had inherited from his classical studies and to which he felt himself called by his own vocation. In an atmosphere that was aristocratic and fastidiously refined, he practised criticism which seemed like a personal diversion on the side, yet which resolved itself into acute and definitive analyses, especially in his essays on Pascoli, d’Annunzio, Panzini and in that survey of literature (*Lettere*) which spans the years from the beginning of the 1900s to the First World War. *La Voce*, to whose circle S. belonged, published in 1914 the *Ringraziamento per una ballata* of P. Fort, which is the clearest example of the writer’s faculty for grafting his own poetic sensibility onto the craft of the critic. Pages which, like the rest of his writings and his most beautiful letters, link almost visual and tactile impressions of the surrounding landscape and nature to his mood and his judgment. The *Esame di coscienza di un letterato*, published posthumously in 1916, reveals his scepticism towards the values of war and the generous “humanism” of S., never dried up in his sensations, though enclosed in an inconsolable solitude.