«Il Ventre di Napoli» di Matilde Serao: vicende testuali e variantistiche

Abstract

This essay aims to pave the way for a critical edition of Matilde Serao’s masterpiece, Il ventre di Napoli.  We moved from the consideration that the recent revival of this author and the always more frequent re-editions of her texts are often not paired with an appropriate philological in-depth study. Il ventre di Napoli was published in 1884 for the first time, on the columns of the roman periodical «Capitan Fracassa». During that same year the author collected those articles into a volume published by Treves. Almost twenty years after, an extended version of the articles appeared on «La Settimana», a journal that Serao published herself, and in 1906 she gathered them into a volume issued by the Neapolitan publisher Perrella. The focus is on the analysis of the author’s variants of Il ventre di Napoli, collected thanks to a systematic comparison between the four printed versions of Matilde Serao’s Il ventre di Napoli, in order to understand Serao’s revising style and comment how such changes affect the text its various versions.