SERRA, RENATO. - Literary critic, b. at Cesena on 5 Dec. 1884, d. on the Podgora on 20 July 1915.
In 1908 he was a teacher at the normal school of Cesena and the following year director of the Malatestiana and Piana Libraries. In his brief and retiring life, the profession of letters was for S. an uninterrupted refinement of humanitas, a sort of religion that he had inherited from his classical studies and to which he was called by his own vocation. In an aristocratic and highly vigilant climate he carried on that criticism which had every appearance of being a "personal diversion on the margins" and which instead resolves itself into acute and definitive analyses, especially in the essays on Pascoli, d'Annunzio, Panzini and in that survey of literature (Lettere), which runs from the beginnings of the 1900s 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 faculty for grafting his own poetic sensibility onto the critic's craft. Pages that, like the others of his writings and of his very beautiful letters, connect almost visual and tactile impressions of the landscape and the surrounding nature to his mood and his judgment. L'esame di coscienza di un letterato, published posthumously in 1916, reveals his skepticism toward the values of the war and the generous "humanism" of S., never dried up in his own sensations, though enclosed in an inconsolable solitude.
Bibliography2 works
De Robertis, A. Grilli, ibid. 1934 (new ed. ibid. 1938). Studies: special issue of Voce of 15 Oct. 1915 dedicated to R. S., pp. 913-1032; C. Bo, Otto studi, Florence 1939, pp. 81-104; P. Nardi, Novecentismo, Milan 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, see index; L. Russo, La critica lett. contemp., III, new ed., Bari 1947, pp. 5-37; various authors, Scritti in onore di R. S., Milan 1948.
Maria Luisa Rondini