Born into a Jewish family of anti-fascist intellectuals, Sereni graduated from the Liceo Terenzio Mamiani in Rome. Brother of the
Zionist and socialist
Enzo Sereni, co-founder of the
kibbutz Givat Brenner, and of Enrico Sereni, a scientist linked to the
anti-fascist movement
Giustizia e Libertà, who committed suicide at a young age. In 1926, Sereni joined the
Italian Communist Party and one year later he graduated in
agronomy in
Portici, starting shortly after a work of proselytism in the Neapolitan area, where he met
Giorgio Amendola. In 1930 he went to
Paris and came into contact with
Palmiro Togliatti. Returning to Italy in September of the same year, he was arrested and sentenced by the
Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State to twenty years, then reduced to 15 for the accumulation of penalties. Amnestied in 1935, Sereni fled to Paris with his wife Xenia Silberberg, known by the name of Marina, and their daughter Lea; there, he was responsible for cultural work and served as editor-in-chief of the magazines
Stato Operaio and
La voce degli italiani. After returning to Italy and once again being discovered in 1943, he was sentenced to 18 years for "subversive association". A year later Sereni managed to escape and settled in
Milan, where the party assigned him the task of directing the office of agitation and propaganda. After having played an important role in the
Italian resistance movement as a representative, together with
Luigi Longo, of the Communist Party in the
National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy and as a member of the insurrectionary committee set up in April 1945, Sereni joined the central committee of the PCI in 1946 (where he would remain until 1975). He was twice minister under
Alcide De Gasperi: first as
Minister for Post-War Assistance, and then as
Minister of Public Works. From 1948 until 1963, he served as a member of the
Senate. During the
Hungarian revolution of 1956, he joined the party leadership in siding with the
Soviet Union. From its founding in 1963, Sereni was an editor of the magazine
Critica marxista. As a
polyglot, Sereni knew
German,
English,
French,
Russian,
Greek,
Latin,
Hebrew,
Japanese, and several dead
cuneiform languages such as
Akkadian,
Sumerian and
Hittite. Among his theoretical and historical works are
Il capitalismo nelle campagne ("Capitalism in the Countryside"), ''Il Mezzogiorno all'opposizione
("Mezzogiorno in the Opposition"), La questione agraria nella rinascita nazionale italiana
("The Agrarian Question in the Italian National Rebirth") and La rivoluzione italiana'' ("The Italian Revolution"); altogether, his bibliography contains 1071 writings, the first dating back to 1930. Sereni donated his archive to the Alcide Cervi Institute in
Gattatico, of which he was a founder. Together with his wife Xenia Silberberg, Sereni was the father of the writer
Clara Sereni. His daughter narrated Sereni's political and family history in the historical novel
Il gioco dei regni ("The Play of Kingdoms"), published by
Giunti in 1993.