2022 edition
A beautiful evening full of contents that of Friday 2 September at the Congress Center of Riva del Garda for the Award Ceremony of the XII edition of Mario Rigoni Stern Award for the multilingual literature of the Alps. Paolo Malaguti won the 2022 edition of the prize with “Il Moro della Cima” published by Einaudi editore. Malaguti got the better of the other authors vying for the victory: Carlo Barbante with “Written in the ice. Journey into the changing climate "(Ed. Il Mulino), Adeline Loyau with" Les tribulations d'une scientifique en montagne "(Ed. Glenat) and Annalina Molteni with" L'ombra dei Walser "(Ed. Monterosa). Warmest congratulations to all as well as to Ulderica Da Pozzo who received the special mention for the book “Femines. Women of milk ”, Forum editions. Also during the ceremony, the Guardian of the Ark - Osvaldo Dongilli Award was also awarded, this year awarded to bees, an irreplaceable insect for the conservation of biodiversity, whose number has been experiencing a sharp decline in recent years. The entomologist and beekeeper Paolo Fontana, president of the World Biodiversity Association, received the award. The jury composed of Sara Luchetta, Giuseppe Mendicino, Luca Mercalli, Annibale Salsa and Niccolò Scaffai thus motivated the choices of the Stern 2022 Prize.
The jury's motivation
As for the winning work, the jury's motivation was as follows: "With" Il Moro della Cima "Paolo Malaguti collects stories and voices from the past to return them with careful and lively writing through the figure of Moro Frun, a three-dimensional character in love with mountain, which reminds us of Mario Rigoni Stern's Tönle Bintarn, with its to and fro, his love for the motherland and the pain of every border and useless conflict. What comes alive on the page is a story full of references and memories that speak loud and clear. They speak of the changes in the Venetian mountain, worked, transformed and sometimes disfigured by the human hand; they speak of a war whose traces we can still read in the landscape and which reminds us of the injustice of all wars, those of yesterday and those of today. They speak of a disappeared peasant civilization, which emerges between the lines with words, objects, miseries, ways of saying and thinking.
An important hope
This book by Paolo Malaguti suggests that that feeling of clarity of ideas and writing, of civil ethics and care of memory, of anti-rhetoric, which runs through the pages of the best Venetian literature, is still alive and strong: Mario Rigoni Stern, Luigi Meneghello, Andrea Zanzotto, Tina Merlin and many others and others. Il Moro and his author descend from there, from that passion of “virtue and knowledge”. The opposite of that slippery progress that increasingly tightens the plains and mountains of the Veneto, which bends the consciences of the courtly intellectuals, which betrays the memory of what has been. This book gives hope that a more serious and civilized world is still possible ”. Upon learning of the victory, Paolo Malaguti, declared: "I receive this award with great joy and emotion, especially for the role that Mario Rigoni Stern had in my training: even in this book, if there is an author behind it, it is he. . But alongside joy I also feel the responsibility of receiving it: for me it also means taking on a demanding mandate, trying to make literature live in the ethical and civil perspective that Rigoni Stern has always cultivated, with humility and humanity, even when it was already a consecrated author ". The Guardian of the Ark - Osvaldo Dongilli award this year was awarded to the Bees, collected by the entomologist and beekeeper Paolo Fontana, with this motivation: "The perfect insect is the bee (...) without them our land would become unhappy desert ”wrote Mario Rigoni Stern in“ Men, woods and bees ”. They are in fact decisive for life on Earth: pollination is linked to the reproduction of about 75% of the plant species living on the planet, which guarantee about 35% of global food production.
Other reports
Unfortunately, however, they are in danger: all the research institutes in the world agree on the fact that there is a process of extinction of this insect, or at least of many of the 20 thousand known species: to ensure environmental conditions for bees that allow them to live and reproduce. it helps the conservation of biodiversity and guarantees our very existence ”. The jury that chose the four finalist works among the 45 received by the secretariat of the Prize, motivated the recommendations of the finalist works:
CARLO BARBANTE, Written in the ice (Il Mulino editions)
“With“ Written in the ice ”the Venetian chemist“ Carlo Barbante takes us on a journey from the Alps to the polar caps to discover the climatic secrets of the past contained in ancient snow and ice. A theme that would have excited MRS, so attentive to the observation of the winter environment. The scientific epic, narrated in the first person by the Author who attended remote Antarctic research bases with a very severe climate, also takes on an ethical value that resonates with two other MRS reference points: environmental and climatic protection and harmony between peoples, well highlighted by the international cooperation between researchers ”.
ADELINE LOYAU, Les tribulations d'une scientifique en montagne (Ed. Glenat
“A passionate and engaging field diary guides us through the difficulties, obstacles, frustrations but also the little great joys of mountain research. What the French biologist and researcher Adeline Loyau takes us on is a journey through the Pyrenees in an attempt to study and understand what in this time of climate and environmental crisis is threatening amphibian populations. These animals, the first vertebrates to populate the terrestrial environment, have survived the greatest extinctions: what is putting them in crisis in the era in which the human being is king? Research with the Pyrenean wildlife brings us back to our Alps and to the interest that Mario Rigoni Stern has always had in wild animals, protagonists of many stories and fundamental elements of mountain ecosystems ”.
ANNALINA MOLTENI, The shadow of the Walser (Ed. Monterosa).
“The« Walser Question »for fifty years now has attracted the attention of scholars. The medieval settlers evoked by Annalisa Molteni - settled around Monte Rosa and in the valleys of the central / western Alps as a result of favorable geo-political and micro-climatic conditions - are the protagonists of her novel «The shadow of the Walser». The author with fluid and compelling writing describes characters and places by combining literary invention with documented geo-historical and ethnographic references. The epic of the men of the "Somme Alps", which historiographical research has brought out after a long and unjustified removal, can thus be known from a new and original perspective. The novel fully captures the spirit of the Prize in highlighting an important aspect of the multiform Alpine culture. A civilization that manifests itself through the presence of niche linguistic minorities within the variegated geographical space of the Alps of which the Cimbri of Mario Rigoni Stern themselves are an expression "(source: Hunting Federation).
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