Leggende Napoletane. [Neapolitan Legends].

SERAO, Matilde.

Leggende Napoletane. [Neapolitan Legends].

Rome: Edoardo Perino, 1895.

Leggende Napoletane — published in English as Neapolitan Legends — is an 1881 collection by Matilde Serao (1856–1927), the Greek-born Italian journalist and novelist who is widely regarded as the foremost female writer of the Italian Verismo movement and one of the most important literary chroniclers of Neapolitan life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection revives sixteen horror-themed stories rooted in Neapolitan oral tradition, drawing on the rich mythological and folkloric substrata of a city whose relationship with the supernatural has always been inseparable from its cultural identity — encompassing ghost legends, tales of doomed passion, and figures from deep within the Neapolitan popular imagination. Among the volume's most celebrated sections is "Virgil the Wizard," which chronicles the medieval legends attaching magical powers to the Roman poet Virgil in Naples, while the figure of 'O Munaciello, the mischievous imp of the old Neapolitan houses, receives one of its most enduring literary treatments. Serao was a long-established investigative journalist and the first woman to edit an Italian journal, co-founding with her husband Edoardo Scarfoglio the newspaper Il Mattino, which remains the largest Neapolitan daily, and she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on multiple occasions — with the prize ultimately going to her Sardinian contemporary Grazia Deledda in 1926. Benedetto Croce praised her imagination as limpid and alive, Carducci called her the greatest woman writer in Italy, and D'Annunzio dedicated a novel to her — assessments that Neapolitan Legends, with its evocative fusion of lyrical prose and deep folkloric knowledge, richly sustains.