The editorial offices were considered privileged literary salons around which orbited the most illustrious names of the new national culture: here he met Matilde Serao, who shortly afterwards became his wife.

[1] With Serao he first founded and ran a newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma, in Rome (1886-87), the first Italian attempt to model a daily journal along the lines of the Parisian press.

The paper was short lived, and after its demise Scarfoglio and Serao moved to Naples where they edited Il Corriere di Napoli in 1888.

The newspaper acted as the mouthpiece of the Mayor of Naples Celestino Summonte, and Alberto Casale, a Liberal member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the local government power broker with extensive contacts in the Neapolitan underworld of the Camorra,[3][4] and blasted the inquiry.

[6] According to the socialist newspaper La Propaganda, Naples was ruled by the Casale-Summonte-Scarfoglio triad; the tip of a corrupt iceberg of officials, politicians and administrators.

The Saredo inquiry confirmed the corruption and revealed that Scarfoglio had received 10,000 lire from a Belgian tramway company that operated several tram lines in the city.

He and his wife were responsible for moving Naples into the mainstream of Italian journalism in the early twentieth century by serializing the works of writers such as D'Annunzio.