Premio Napoli 2022, the nine finalist authors of the 68th edition of the historic literary prize have been chosen. The awards ceremony will take place on December 20 at the Teatro Stabile in Naples.
For the selection of the finalist candidates for the 2022 edition, over 150 literary works, sent by publishing houses, have reached the Fondazione Premio Napoli. At the end of a long selection process, the Technical Jury, like every year, chooses nine, three for each category: Fiction, Poetry and Non-Fiction.
Unlike other Italian literary awards, the Premio Napoli has a special feature: a large group of “reader judges”. Literature enthusiasts who ask to participate, read and judge the works in competition. They come from all over the country, from the city of Naples, from the province, from schools, from the suburbs and even from prisons.
The “reader judges” have the privilege of being able to read beautiful works and offer their own point of view with a vote. Over the years they have continued to grow until they are almost 2 thousand.
The final phase of the Naples Prize takes place in autumn when the authors of the three sections meet the readers and the public before the final evening and the announcement of the winner.
This edition of the Naples Award is dedicated to the writer Raffaele La Capria, who recently passed away.
“This edition of the Naples Prize will be particularly significanta – comments the mayor of Naples and president of the Fondazione Premio Napoli, Gaetano Manfredi –. It will fall in a historical period in which culture represents even more than in the past the lever for social growth, first and foremost among the younger generations; it will remember with a dutiful tribute the memory of an extraordinary writer of our land like Raffaele La Capria; it will enhance the relationship with the readers who are judges of the works in competition, confirming the peculiarity of the Naples Prize in the national literary panorama".
NARRATIVE
Titti Marrone, If Only My Heart Were Stone, Feltrinelli
Fabio Stassi, Master Geppetto, Sellerio
Massimo Zamboni, The Will Triumph, Einaudi
POETRY
Silvia Bre, The Bells, Einaudi
Gabriele Frasca, Letters to Valentinov, Luca Sossella Editore
Valerio Magrelli, Exfanzia, Einaudi
NONFICTION
Daniela Brogi, The Space of Women, Einaudi
Massimo Fusillo, Heroes of Love, Il Mulino
Enzo Traverso, Revolution 1789-1989, Feltrinelli
Special mention for the reportage by Salvatore Porcaro, L'estate è finita. Racconto corale del costiera domizio, Monitor Edizioni. The Foundation hopes to open a section of the Premio Napoli on narrative reportage starting from the next edition.
The nine finalists were selected by the Technical Jury of the Napoli Prize, led by Alfredo Contieri and Carmen Petillo, and composed of Mirella Armiero, Stefano Balassone, Maurizio Braucci, Edoardo Camurri, Valerio Caprara, Antonella Cilento, Chiara Ghidini, Antonio Gnoli, Alfredo Guardiano, Eugenio Lucrezi, Wanda Marasco, Bruno Moroncini, Ermanno Paccagnini, Matteo Palumbo, Giacomo Raccis, Monica Ruocco, Pasquale Sabbatino, Antonio Tricomi, Paola Villani. With the 2022 edition, the experience of this Technical Jury that has expertly accompanied the Napoli Prize in the mission of spreading culture ends and the Foundation intends to thank all the jurors for the work done in these years.
The Foundation also thanks the lawyer Domenico Ciruzzi for the work carried out during his mandate as President of the Naples Prize and for having relaunched the Foundation as a point of reference for the cultural and social debate of the city.
THE WORKS
Titti Marrone, If Only My Heart Were Stone, Feltrinelli
In 1945, Sir Benjamin Drage's country house became a residence for young survivors of the extermination camps, twenty-five children between the ages of four and fifteen welcomed and cared for thanks to the initiative and determination of Anna Freud, daughter of the great Sigmund, and Alice Goldberger, his collaborator. Each child has a different, terrible and special story, each comes from their own personal hell. Alice and her team fight to give them back their childhood, creating for over a decade a center where the most recent acquisitions in child psychology, pedagogy and art are put at the service of the needs of children coming from concentration camps, orphanages and convents or from the hiding places where their parents left them during the war, in a last-ditch attempt to save their lives. Titti Marrone digs into History, opens the archives, cross-references documents, photos, diaries and letters to transpose Lingfield's courageous and moving experience into a novel. His pen follows with delicate participation the encounter with childhood of each child, the surfacing of traumas and painful memories, the progressive loosening of the tightest knots. Until the beginning of their second lives.
Fabio Stassi, Master Geppetto, Sellerio
A father in search of his son. A carpenter and his puppet. What if the adventures of Geppetto, the creator of Pinocchio, were completely different from how we know them? What if, alongside the adventures of the puppet who became a child, there were also those of a father who wanted a son so much that he built one with his own hands? Fabio Stassi has written a new story based on a classic story, that of one of the greatest novels in Italian literature. In his pages, the elderly carpenter becomes a feverish man driven by the desire for fatherhood, the victim of a cruel prank played by his fellow citizens. The puppet's funny, dramatic, violent exploits mix with his adventures, which are in turn surprising and at times disconcerting. Geppetto the man seems to emerge from Collodi's fairy tale for adults and children and move onto a contemporary stage where poverty, illness, the need for love, cruelty and redemption are at the centre of the scene, the concrete engine of the action. Thus Geppetto becomes the portrait of an introverted and fearless man, candid and visionary, who is about to face the world and discover it anew, chasing the dream of a creature that is flesh of his flesh, into which he can pour out the emotions and affection he carries within. But that world despises and mocks him, revealing all its ferocity in a merciless condemnation of solitude and diversity. In Mastro Geppetto Stassi abandons himself with evident pleasure to one of his great talents, that of shaping the real and imaginary matter of stories and characters to draw from them a tale that is rooted in desire and fantasy, producing the metamorphosis that transforms the fiction of literary art into the most luminous and moving, most painful and human truth.
Massimo Zamboni, The Will Triumph, Einaudi
Through the incredible story of a land where loyalty to the Communist Party was sacred and the wind from Russia blew strong, Massimo Zamboni comes to terms with the great utopia of the twentieth century in a truly original way: at the center of this passionate choral tale, there are Emilia and the town of Cavriago, and the adventures of its inhabitants. When in 1919 they sent a telegram of solidarity to revolutionary Russia and a few months later, on the day of the foundation of the Communist International, Lenin in his speech praised the courage of "that remote corner", which he had searched in vain on the map. Or when they participated in the "conference of the century" at the theater of Reggio Emilia: a debate on the opportunity to grant permission to shoot the film about Peppone and Don Camillo. Or when, in 1970, they inaugurated with "a shiver of emotion" the bust of Lenin in the town square, in front of an official delegation of the PCUS. To then jump out of their warm beds to stand guard over the bronze monument threatened by some attempted decapitation. Dreamers and realists, stubborn people with a very strong sense of brotherhood, the protagonists of this story are women and men with an inexhaustible political passion, citizens of the great world, in whose events there is all the strength and persistence, and finally the nostalgia, of that ideal, crazy and wonderful drive that made them feel they were on the right side. With "a dose of emotion, a dose of sarcasm, a dose of practical and Emilian sense of disenchantment", Massimo Zamboni has often written and sung about the dissolution of that time, but here he opens it before our eyes intact and full of life, anger and yearning, giving us the epic of a memory from which to start again, the epic of a land where the red flag waved higher than all.
Silvia Brè, The Bells, Einaudi
In life we are attracted by distances that call us, that we do not see and do not know, like by the sound of distant bells. It is a remote, mysterious sound, an original beat, in whose tolling the poetic word is born and returns, each time, to dissolve. In the bells Silvia Bre tries to capture rhythms that flow underground to life but that of life, not only individual, are the hidden lymph. Sometimes a somersault is necessary, of perception and grammar. But more often this poetic language is refined by concentration, by elision, by cancellation of all that is superfluous, in the tension towards the origin of things, in the attention to the connections that bind them, for the moment of meaning when it expands and seems eternal. The bells cannot but also have a mortuary, commemorative aspect. And in fact, towards the end of the collection, the notes take on an almost cemetery tone and the lexicon thickens with "dust", "skeletons", "darkness". As if the vibration of the bells preceded and surpassed the tolling of life, and finally revealed a sidereal mystery, the announcement of a "celestial language of disappearance".
Gabriele Frasca, Letters to Valentinov, Luca Sossella
Letters to Valentinov are born around a question: how did it happen that a century that began with the progressive inertia of revolutions culminated in the restoration of a ferociously iniquitous and unequal society? And what role do pandemics play in this slide? Gabriele Frasca answers by investigating many “rhymes of history,” and among all the one that links the Spanish flu epidemic of a century ago, which came to decimate Europe and the planet together with the First World War, to the current one. By making the spring offensive resonate and an article by Pasolini from 1974, the Stalinist purges and the space race, the events of 1977 and a zarzuela by José Serrano Simeón, a restless dream by Trotsky and the nightmare close to awakening by Philip K. Dick, Frasca describes a world that was already in quarantine before we realized it.
Valerio Magrelli, Exfanzia, Einaudi
Valerio Magrelli has repeatedly addressed the theme of childhood, in poetry and prose, also through autobiographical pages. This is his book of maturity, but childhood and adolescence do not disappear completely: they are seen as in a mirror. Reversed images to be interpreted from another point of view and with other perspectives. The figure of Tom Thumb, who also returns in a later poem, refers to the most typical imagery of the child's world, to the fear of getting lost, but getting lost, in another poem, is confessed as a characteristic of an entire life: taking the wrong road on a journey, confusing one city with another. Geographical confusion, onomastic confusion. Conditions of loss that have always constituted heuristic strong points in Magrelli's poetry. The residues of childhood have shaped an entire existence but now, on the threshold of old age, they take on a completely different aspect. They are and are no longer what they were. Childhood becomes the object of a gaze, rather than of self-analysis. It is the tenderness towards the children or the graffiti boys. The point of view is now old age («a question of hydraulics»), the «last peak» to climb that is approaching. But the charm of this book is that the «ex» overturns but does not erase the «in». Everything is held together. Just as together with the generational theme other themes flow, more lateral in this book compared to the previous books, but no less important: illness, «bitter blood», music, pop culture. Always with that ability that is typical of Magrelli to start from a scene or an observation and transform them into an unexpected, enlightening or, often, disturbing mental journey.
Daniela Brogi, The Space of Women, Einaudi
For many centuries, only the works and books of men have been considered interesting, while women have been trained to have no talent. They have been silenced, forgotten, left out. The solution now is to rebuild the entire field on which the game of culture is played. The basic thesis of this book is: how to stop considering the world only in male terms. Escaping from this prejudicial "naturalness" and "normality" is not a polemical objective, but a critical opportunity for growth and comparison, even intercultural. To stop considering the world and culture only in male terms is not a matter of looking at the cultural landscape of the twentieth century, for example, also adding women, nor of repeating the logic of the harem, the flowerbed, or the men-only club. But of making the presence and importance of women count, even when they have been silenced or obscured.
Massimo Fusillo, Heroes of Love, Il Mulino
Traditionally linked to the public sphere, the figure of the hero embodies the values with which a community identifies itself. Who are the heroes of love, the private experience par excellence? What is heroic love in the imagination of all ages? It is the love of the closed and faithful couple of Romeo and Juliet (but also of Diabolik and Eva Kant!), a microcosm that conquers space and time and has death as its only obstacle. It is the unrequited love of Phaedra and Madama Butterfly, an unspeakable illness, physical and mental, that often leads to self-destructive madness. Or, on the contrary, it is the free and subversive love of Don Giovanni and Carmen, which presents itself as seduction, inebriating beauty and sensuality. The book tells the story of passionate love through the stories of heroes and heroines of literature, melodrama and cinema, but also looking at real loves, which are fueled by mediations and triangulations.
Enzo Traverso, Revolution 1789-1989, Feltrinelli
Walter Benjamin had probably just finished reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution when he compared revolutions to nuclear fission, an explosion capable of releasing and multiplying energies contained in the past. Revolutions are movements of violent rupture. They do not concern single individuals, but are earthquakes that human beings experience collectively. After the fall of the Wall, the narrative on this concept flattened out on the idea that changing the world corresponds to a threat of totalitarianism. According to Enzo Traverso, however, the concept of revolution can be an interpretative key to modernity and, even, to our present, but on one condition: his investigation must intertwine with images, memories and hopes, which constantly change and renew their strength over time. Rehabilitating revolutions as crucial moments in modern history does not mean idealizing them. Rather, it means not giving up understanding them as dramatic moments, intensely experienced by their protagonists, and therefore capable of igniting energies, passions and feelings, to the point of provoking transformations not only in politics but also in aesthetic canons. Traverso captures the material and intellectual elements of a fragmentary and often forgotten revolutionary experience. The past reveals itself through its dialectical images: locomotives, bodies, barricades, flags, places, songs, paintings, photographs, posters, dates. A very rich legacy, to be reorganized and interpreted, which the left of the 21st century needs to overcome old exhausted models and build a new horizon of meaning and action.
Porcaro Salvatore, Summer is over. A choral tale of the Domitian coast, Monitor Edizioni
Since the 1960s, the coast north of Naples has undergone a violent transformation. Thousands of people have invested their savings to buy land, build houses and spend their holidays a few kilometres from their permanent residences. A process developed outside of all legality, which has completely erased a valuable natural heritage. At the beginning of the 1980s, with the arrival of earthquake victims and then of those displaced by bradyseism, those settlements radically changed function, becoming a collection of dormitories on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. The 1990s were marked by the settlement of immigrants and trafficking by organised crime. Today, many families affected by the crisis are moving along the coast, to the houses they had built for the holidays, or renting low-cost apartments. A choice that ends up marginalising them even more.
This book is the fruit of ten years of research, during which the author has travelled the length and breadth of the Domitian coast, meeting hundreds of people and establishing relationships that have led him from the initial objectives of knowledge to the more urgent ones of intervention and critical reflection.
Article published on 27 July 2022 - 17:26
