Vittorio Sereni was born in Luino on the 27th of July 1913. At first he lived in Brescia and then in Milan where he graduated in Italian literature in 1936 with a thesis treating Guido Gozzano.
During his university years he frequented a group of young intellectuals who as their 'guiding light' acknowledged the figure of the philosopher Antonio Banfi. From among these intellectuals we can mention Remo Cantoni, Enzo Paci, Antonia Pozzi, Luciano Anceschi, Raffaele De Grada, Daria Menicanti and Renato Guttuso.
Sereni was one of the founders - in 1938 - of the review Corrente and collaborated with Campo di Marte and Frontespizio . In 1941 he published his first book of poetry, entitled Frontiera, Called up by the army he was first sent to Greece and then to Sicily. Taken prisoner on the 24th of July 1943 he spent two years in prisoner of war camps in Algeria and Morocco. From these experiences he drew both material and inspiration for his second book of verse, published in 1947 with the explicative title of Diario d'Algeria.
After the war he worked as a teacher, at the same time collaborating with the paper Milano Sera as a literary critic.
In 1952 he joined the Pirelli Company. Only a few years later he joined the Mondadori Publishing House as literary director, an appointment he held until his death on the 10th of February 1983.
In 1965 he published Gli strumenti umani whereas his last collection entitled Stella variabile appeared in 1981.
Vittorio Sereni is acknowledged as being the founder of the current of poets that calls itself Linea Lombarda, taking its name from an anthology of poems by Luciano Anceschi published in 1952 by the Magenta Publishing House of Varese. The following form part of this current: Roberto Rebora, Giorgio Orelli, Nelo Risi, Renzo Modesti and Luciano Erba. This group proposed to once more find [...] certain threads interrupted or concealed, to reconstruct ties lost (L. Anceschi in Linea Lombarda, p. 7), in this way trying to retrieve the relationship between poetry and reality, reappropriating historical reality without neglecting the lesson of hermetic poetry.