The Premio Strega reaches its 80th edition and, as a novelty this year, the award ceremony has been announced in Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, on July 8, instead of the usual setting of the Villa Giulia garden.
There are 79 books proposed by the Amici della Domenica, which will now be examined by the Steering Committee, composed of Pietro Abate, Giuseppe D’Avino, Valeria Della Valle, Alberto Foschini, Paolo Giordano, Dacia Maraini, Melania G. Mazzucco, Gabriele Pedullà, Stefano Petrocchi, Marino Sinibaldi, and Giovanni Solimine.
Among the proposed titles is the novel Dove cadono le comete by Vito di Battista, published by Feltrinelli, nominated by Maria Ida Gaeta with the following motivation:
«It is an autobiographical novel but it is also a historical novel; a book that tells the individual lives of its characters in a way that only makes sense when those individual lives intersect, when the I becomes we, when individual history becomes family history, then community history. The events take place from 1938 onwards, spanning World War II, bombings, occupation, and liberation, up to the 1970s of the twentieth century. The protagonists actually existed; they are the great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles of the author. And the small town where the events occur is the author’s town, a seaside village on the Abruzzo coast perched on a hill, the land of trabocchi. All the stories were told to the author orally, predominantly in dialect, and he returns them by inventing a language that at first impact may be a bit disconcerting, but soon reveals itself to be refined and beautiful, very “right” for the balance it manages to find between dialect and Italian. A traditional yet atypical, original novel, like its characters, capable of facing the adventures and misadventures that life reserves for them. I was captivated by the tender and melancholic gaze of the author, who transfigures real life into literature.»
Recently, Vito di Battista’s novel was awarded the Premio Dante Arfelli – Città di Bertinoro, in the category of published novels.
