Edoardo Scarfoglio

Edoardo Scarfoglio (26 September 1860 – 6 October 1917) was an Italian author and journalist, one of the early practitioners in Italian fiction of realism, a style of writing that embraced direct, colloquial language and rejected the more ornate style of earlier Italian literature. His name is chiefly associated with the newspaper Il Mattino in Naples, which he owned and edited for many years, and still is the largest daily newspaper in the city.

Early life and career Scarfoglio was born in Paganica, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, but lived and worked in Naples much of his life. His father, Michele Scarfoglio, was a magistrate of Calabrian origin and his mother, Marianna Volpe, was of Abruzzese origin. He had a difficult school career due to his rebellious temperament and after repeating several classes at a high school in Chieti, he was sent to Rome to his uncle Carlo, to study at the prestigious Ennio Quirino Visconti Liceo Ginnasio.

On February 28, 1885 he married Matilde Serao, the best-known woman writer in Italy at the time, to avoid a scandal about the writer's pregnancy (later not carried to term). and blasted the inquiry.

Scarfoglio had close friends among politicians from the "high Camorra", which paid for his yacht with a permanent crew of eleven. According to the socialist newspaper La Propaganda, Naples was ruled by the Casale-Summonte-Scarfoglio triad; the tip of a corrupt iceberg of officials, politicians and administrators. Scarfoglio launched frenzied attacks against the socialist newspaper and the chairman of the inquiry, Giuseppe Saredo, who was described as an evil eye, and the inquiry was compared to a pestilential disease. The Saredo inquiry confirmed the corruption and revealed that Scarfoglio had received 10,000 lire from a Belgian tramway company that operated several tram lines in the city. Scarfoglio remained in Sicily until 1907, and subsequently returned to Naples and Il Mattino.

Il Mattino played a prominent role in the years-long investigation into the Cuocolo murder and subsequent trial. Scarfoglio supported the prosection's line of investigation with dozens of articles signed in particular by the newspaper's influential editor and crime reporter Ernesto Serao. At the time of trial in Viterbo in 1911-1912, he organised filming of the hearings during the day in Viterbo, had the film transported with great speed to Naples, to screen it the next evening in the public shopping gallery Galleria Umberto I, next to the newspaper office, in mute (as sound film was not yet available), with megaphone commentary by a journalist, with an enormous influx of spectators. According to the main government witness, who in 1927 retracted his incriminating statements, Scarfoglio had received 40,000 lire from the Carabinieri to support their version of the trial.

He and his wife were responsible for moving Naples into the mainstream of Italian journalism in the early twentieth century by serializing the works of writers such as D'Annunzio. As an editorialist in his own paper, Scarfoglio supported such policies as Italian expansionism in Africa and the Aegean in the 1890s. He is the father of journalists Carlo Scarfoglio and Antonio Scarfoglio. He died in Naples, following a heart attack, on 6 October 1917.