The Giorgio Scerbabenco Archive is kept at the Municipal Library.
The famous crime writer, head teacher of the noir genre in Italy and a point of reference for many contemporary writers, chose Lignano Sabbiadoro as a place of inspiration for his plots, frequently visiting the town and then also setting up his residence there.
On August 10, 2011, on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's birth, the Municipal Administration named a room in the Civic Center/Municipal Library after Giorgio Scerbanenco and Cecilia Scerbanenco, daughter of the writer, in order to make the material contained in the father's archive accessible to scholars, she entrusted it to the Library for storage.
This personal archive includes: the first editions of the novels, the original manuscripts and typescripts of the novels with pen corrections, the articles, the research, the notes, some letters, several years of the magazines he directed or in which the stories are published, the writer's work tools.
The materials of the Giorgio Scerbanenco Archive can be consulted by scholars accredited to the Library.
All copyrights relating to the material constituting the Fund and their exploitation remain the property of Cecilia Scerbanenco and Germana Scerbanenco.
Giorgio Scerbanenco
Biography
Giorgio Scerbanenco was born in Kiev in 1911, on July 28, according to the ancient Orthodox calendar, which corresponds to August 10 of ours.
His father, Valeriano, is an intellectual, a descendant of a family of landowners, a scholar of Latin and Greek. His cultural interests led him to Rome, where he met the writer's future mother, Leda Giulivi, a lively and curious young woman who belonged to a Roman bourgeoisie family
.
Scerbanenco thus spends his childhood between Kiev and Rome, where he will be stuck together with his mother after the outbreak of the First World War and then the October Revolution.
When the writer is just eight years old, his mother takes him with her on an adventurous journey to Kiev, in search of her husband of whom they have no more news. Unfortunately, Valeriano died during the revolution and Leda and her son just have to face another difficult journey to return home, to Rome
.
Here the writer spends happy years, until his mother decides to move to Milan, where a brother already lives, thus hoping to ensure a better future for her son. Giorgio Scerbanenco is 16 years old and his first encounter with the city is not easy. He carries out various jobs, including manuals, but always studying as a self-taught person in libraries, in particular
that of Brera. It was
precisely in Brera that he met some future protagonists of the Milanese publishing and cultural world who helped him to make himself known. After the first stories, the first articles and poems published in minor magazines, in 1934 he managed to publish his own story, “Repentance”, in Piccola,
Rizzoli's magazine.
From then on, thanks to his talent, Scerbanenco's career was very fast.
In the period from 1934 to 1943 he collaborated with almost all of Rizzoli's magazines; he kept an email with the readers, under the pseudonym Luciano, on Grazia. For Mondadori, he also published the first series of crime novels starring Arthur Jelling, Boston Police Archivist (immediately translated into Switzerland). Still for Rizzoli or other publishers, he published other novels; in 1942 he began to collaborate permanently with the afternoon edition of the Corriere della Sera, always with stories,
novels in episodes and elzeviri.
After September 8, 1943, like most of the editorial staff of the Corriere, Scerbanenco returned to Switzerland, where, however, he continued his activity as a journalist for small local newspapers.
The works of this period reflect the author's difficult psychological condition; while on the one hand the “public” works are unusually moralistic, the private ones, the stories and novels that Scerbanenco writes by hand on blocks of paper are violent and distressing.
When he returned to Milan at the end of April 1945, the writer immediately resumed working: indeed, the publisher Rizzoli binds him to himself with an exclusive contract.
She entrusts him with the management of Novella, then a literary magazine aimed at a female audience, and the creation of a new magazine, Bella, still with stories but with more pages dedicated to fashion and current events. On Annabella, under the name of Adrian, a very lucky post begins with the readers, which accompanies the one on Novella (Valentino's Mail
) resumed as early as August 1946.
Precisely this continuous, affectionate contact with readers makes Scerbanenco one of the most beloved writers of “romance” novels of the period, so much so that Liala herself, in her letter, defines him as her rival. Between 1945 and 1964, she wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of stories that speak without illusions about women's lives: deceived girls, poor girls determined to do anything to get out of misery, women disappointed in marriage, women fleeing from unsustainable family situations
.
To these must be added all his work as a journalist and director: the weekly issues of Novella and Bella, ironic and profound articles on etiquette and current affairs for female audiences.
At the end of the 1950s, during a business trip along the Via Romea, which follows the Adriatic coast from Ravenna and the mouth of the Po, he arrived by chance in Lignano, at the time a small and little known seaside resort.
He fell in love with it to such an extent that he set several of his novels there and, from March 1965, he moved his residence there from Milan.
In the early '60s, thanks to his success as a “pink” writer, he decided to try a genre, that of the investigative novel set in Italy, almost unexplored at the time.
The character he creates, Duca Lamberti, a doctor banned from the register for euthanasia, an 'informal' police consultant, is an enormous success. After the release of the first novel in the cycle, 'Private Venus', in 1966, Scerbanenco could dedicate himself only to the 'black' genre, abandoning the
management of magazines.
He received requests for collaboration from many newspapers, including La Stampa, Oggi, Bolero, and, the only Italian writer, he won the Grand Prize for Crime Literature in Paris twice in a row, in 1967 and 1968.
There are also many proposals from the cinema: participation in the screenplays of the films based on his novels; original subjects for television. Scerbanenco is so passionate about cinema that he thinks of returning to
live in Rome.
Unfortunately, at the end of 1968, the symptoms of a serious illness appeared, leading to his death in October of the following year.
Cecilia Scerbanenco
© reproduction prohibited