SERRA, RENATO. – Literary critic, born in Cesena on 5 December 1884, died on Podgora on 20 July 1915.
In 1908 he was a teacher at the teacher-training school of Cesena and the following year director of the Malatestiana and Piana Libraries. In his brief and shadowed life, the profession of letters was for S. an unceasing refinement of humanitas, a kind of religion that he had inherited from his classical studies and to which he was called by his vocation. In an aristocratic and highly vigilant atmosphere he practised a criticism that had every appearance of being a “personal diversion on the margins” and that instead resolved itself into acute and definitive analyses, especially in the essays on Pascoli, d’Annunzio, Panzini, and in that survey of literature (Letters) extending from the beginnings of the twentieth century to the First World War. La Voce, to whose group S. belonged, published in 1914 the Ringraziamento per una ballata by P. Fort, which is the clearest example of the writer’s ability to graft his poetic sensibility onto the critic’s craft. These pages, like the others in his writings and in his beautiful letters, connect almost visual and tactile impressions of the surrounding landscape and nature with his mood and his judgment. L’esame di coscienza di un letterato, published posthumously in 1916, denounces scepticism regarding the values of war and S.’s generous “humanism,” never dried up in its own sensations, although enclosed within an inconsolable solitude.
(courtesy of Fr. F. Antonelli)
SERRA, JUNIPERO — Portrait. Copy of the contemporary original that was preserved in the Convent of S. Cruz at Querétaro, now lost — Mission of S. Barbara.
Robertis, A. Grilli, there 1934 (new ed. there 1938). Studies: issue of Voce of 15 October 1915 dedicated to R. S., pp. 913–1032; C. Bo, Otto studi, Firenze 1939, pp. 81–104; P. Nardi, Novecentismo, Milano 1926, pp. 175–212; P. Pancrazi, Scrittori italiani (dal Carducci al d'Annunzio), Bari 1943, pp. 187–99; M. Petrocchi, L'uomo e la storia, Bologna 1944, V. indice; L. Russo, La critica lett. contemp., III, new ed., Bari 1947, pp. 5–37; various authors, Scritti in onore di R. S., Milano 1948. Maria Luisa Rondini