Matilde Serao, Flânerie, and Women in Urban Spaces

Focusing on the early years of Matilde Serao’s career in Rome (1882–1887), this chapter examines issues of women’s exclusion from public discourse and spaces of social interaction in late nineteenth-century Italy. Drawing on private letters and articles, it analyzes the ambiguity underlying the practice of flânerie, while illustrating Serao’s complex negotiation of Rome’s intellectual milieu and contestation of prevailing social norms constraining women’s mobility. Her careful self-fashioning highlights the kind of maneuvering a woman writer had to resort to in public and semi-public domains to elude patriarchal surveillance and scandal. Finally, the study turns its attention to Serao’s article, “La donna ‘réclame’” [Woman as Advertisement] (1886), to demonstrate her understanding of the ambiguities and dangers of women’s exposure in the streets, as well as her insight into sexual politics and the commodification of the female body