entry Jan
2006
Antonio Scarfoglio
Antonio Scarfoglio (1886-1969) was the son of Edoardo Scarfoglio and Matilde Serao, both well-known
Neapolitan writers of the turn of the century and
founders of il Mattino, the Neapolitan daily
newspaper. Antonio became a reporter for that paper and
was one of the three drivers of the Italian team that
entered the 1908 New York-to-Paris
car race. He wrote extensively about the race,
first in the form of about 50 dispatches that he wired
back to his paper as the race progressed, and then in a
book published in 1910: Il giro del mondo in automobile
(Around the World by Automobile). After the race, he
returned to other reporting for il Mattino. He
reported on the devastating earthquake in Messina in
December, 1908. In June of 1909, he reported on the
infamous massacre of Armenians in Adana, Turkey; in 1910
he published a widely-read interview in the Paris paper,
Matin, with
empress Eugenie [the wife of Napoleon III]; he
co-founded a film journal, L'arte muta [The Silent Art] in 1915
and in 1924 he was responsible for producing Italy's
first newspaper photo supplement section, il Mattino Illustrato,
using the new rotogravure printing process. He and his
brothers had taken over il Mattino upon the death of their
father in 1917, but were ousted in 1928 by the bank of
Naples in what amounted to a "hostile takeover."
Interestingly,
at his passing il
Mattino published, as paid-for obituaries, only
two small notices: one from his immediate family and the
other from colleagues at the Union of Neapolitan
Journalists, which he had helped to found decades earlier.
(The lack of attention given his death by his old paper
was perhaps the result of lingering hostility between the
paper and the Scarfoglio family.) The crosstown rival
paper in Naples, il
Roma, on the other hand, ran a long and laudatory
article. "Totò Scarfoglio has died," it proclaimed, using
the nickname of endearment for "Antonio." It praised his
early reporting on the 1906 eruption of Vesuvius, the
Great Race, his work abroad in France, and in general
lauded him as a jovial, energetic man of extreme
likability, someone who took advantage of being a
contemporary of the greats of young Italy, the likes of
D'Annunzio and Crispi, in order to help shape early
Italian journalism.
©
2002 - 2023