Enrico Castelnuovo

Born in Florence in 1839 into a Jewish family, he spent most of his life in Venice, the city most closely linked with both his career and his fiction. He took part in the movement for Italian unification and later worked for many years at Venice's commercial school, eventually serving in a leading role there.

He was known above all as a novelist and short-story writer, though he also wrote literary criticism and historical pieces. Much of his work drew on Venetian life and on the social questions of his time, giving his books a direct, observant quality that helped him find a broad readership in late 19th-century Italy.

He died in 1915. He was also the father of the mathematician Guido Castelnuovo, but his own legacy rests on a long literary career that joined public concerns with accessible storytelling.