Renato Serra was born in Cesena, a small town in northern Italy, in 1884. An extraordinarily early reader, he studied at the University of Bologna and completed his scholarly apprenticeship in Florence. In 1910 he was appointed director of the prestigious Malatestiana Library. He lived the retired existence of an aristocratic "province reader", dedicated to an incessant, passionate conversation with the classics and with the great authors of contemporary literature. From a remote position, destined to be decisive, he participated in the fundamental intellectual adventure of the militant magazines of the beginning of the century, especially "La Voce". In 1914 he published the essay Le lettere. Serra finished writing the Literature Examination of Conscience, his masterpiece, and his spiritual testament, a week before rejoining the army, on April 1, 1915. He died on the battlefield a few months later, on July 20. Brilliant literary critic and anticipator, irreplaceable "older brother", prematurely disappeared, for Italian intellectuals of the 20th century, Renato Serra expressed the lucid and tormented awareness of a time of crisis, destined to lead to the anonymous and mechanized massacres of the first war world. His work, luminous and fatally unfinished like all modern art, reveals to us the very high stylistic temperature of a writing subject to the law of an inner demon, which transforms it into splendid poems en prose, in sparkling "art prose".

"And here it would really be necessary to say something about that admirable, charming, very poetic critic, perhaps the surest, most persuasive temperament, even when it is hard to agree, that has appeared among the Italian critics of our century".
Giacomo Debenedetti

"This unfinished essay [Departure for Libya of a group of soldiers] reflects the complex personality of a man who, in addition to being the best Italian critic of his generation, was a scholar with strong philosophical interests."
Carlo Ginzburg

"And the diary-essay -which seemed to want to annul the individual in the perspective of the species, to extinguish history in the biological flow of the generations- recovers the individual and recovers the historical vicissitude from an existential perspective"
Mario Isnenghi

"The enormous suggestion exerted by Serra on his contemporaries and on the younger generation of critics is all in the gesture with which the critic's myth is newly invented."
Alfonso Berardinelli