With Orhan Pamuk, Benedetta Craveri and Michele Mari triumph at the Costa Smeralda Award

It is only the first of a long series of events that, during the summer, will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Costa Smeralda, the important anniversary that commemorates the year in which Prince Karim Aga Khan gave life to the Emerald Consortium, the cornerstone of what will be one of the tourist interventions that still today is the most successful in the world.

Yesterday at the Conference Center in Porto Cervo, during the final ceremony of the Costa Smeralda 2022 Award, strongly supported by the Costa Smeralda Consortium chaired by Renzo Persico and directed by Massimo Marcialis, with the support of Smeralda Holding, the winners of the two categories were announced. Fiction and Non-fiction, chosen by a high quality jury led by the artistic director Stefano Salis and composed of Lina Bolzoni, Marcello Fois, Elena Loewenthal and Chiara Valerio.

Numerous personalities of the jet set, famous consortium members and important personalities including Count Luigi Donà Dalle Rose who, shortly after the arrival of the Aga Khan, founded the other famous village on the Gallura coast, Porto Rotondo, were present.

Benedetta Craveri , literary critic and writer, was awarded the Nonfiction Prize for “La contessa. Virginia Verasis di Castiglione "(Adelphi, 2021).

This is the reason: "La contessa" is more than a biography and more than an inlay of voices. The countess is Virginia Verasis of Castiglione. Charming and tireless seductress, comedian, fine political weaver, cultivator of her own personality and of beautiful things, adored, lover but disinterested in sex, a poor woman of herself in the last years of Parisian solitude, La Contessa accompanies the reader on a luminescent grand-tour (driven) in nineteenth-century Europe. Not everything can be reconstructed on the internet, not everything can be found, sometimes scholars and scholars and archives are needed. A compelling and exciting book that is also a journey into the mind of a woman, Benedetta Craveri, used to moving not only in the world, but also in letters and papers.

The writer Michele Mari with "The majestic ruins of Sferopoli" (Einaudi, 2021) was awarded the Narrative Award and the words of the Jury are almost a manifesto: "When it is stated that in this country there are more writers than readers, it is superficial statement. It would be more correct to say that in our country, and beyond, there are more people who publish than those who read. The 'writers' are in a decidedly proportional number. One of the indisputable points of reference for establishing this discriminant, and determining this percentage, is Michele Mari. Reading his extraordinary novels and short story collections, the dilemma between writing, or simply publishing, dissolves immediately. 'The Majestic Ruins of Spheropolis' is a collection of short and lightning-fast pieces, beautifully conceived. A masterpiece of writing in an area, such as that of the story, considered, wrongly, a sub-genre, while, on the contrary, it recalls and highlights those skills which, precisely, clarify the sidereal distance between who writes and who, momentarily, publish ".

During the ceremony, presented by the journalist Roberta Floris, three special awards were also awarded.

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk , Nobel Prize for Literature 2006, received the International Prize: "A leading intellectual, teacher, journalist, activist, a voice who has always risked himself, with his positions and statements , in defense of democracy and rights, Pamuk today renews the figure and role of the writer and moves, in the millenary scenario of the Mediterranean, as a personality that mixes each and every one of its values - writes the Jury - It reminds us, with the his presence, with his activity, which the artist and the writer undertake to reveal, never denying the past but trying to understand and interpret it, traces of the future and scenarios of possibility ".

The Culture of the Mediterranean Award to Giuseppe Barbera , full professor of Arboreal Cultures at the University of Palermo, who with his natural history books has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Grinzane Cavour, for his "role as writer, popularizer and profound connoisseur of the role of the human and of culture in nature, and vice versa ".

In closing Special Prize to the multifaceted Nuorese musician Gavino Murgia , who performed during the ceremony, "for his contribution to the enhancement of Sardinian musical culture".

Great satisfaction expressed by Renzo Persico, president of the Costa Smeralda Consortium: "At the halfway point of a renewed Costa Smeralda Award, we can be satisfied: we wanted to relaunch the appointment with great culture in Costa Smeralda, enhancing the best literature and the best contemporary non-fiction. Judging by the extraordinary selection of the jury, it seems that we have moved in the right direction ”.

The winners were given a work by the sculptor Giuseppe Sanna, consisting of a natural-shaped stone, in basalt, marble, granite, trachyte and limestone. The Costa Smeralda Prize is the first literary prize that uses stone as an emblem. Expression of the bond with the territory, symbol of concreteness, solidity, ability to resist over time, the typical stones of the Sardinian landscape and forged by nature, have a different geological expression, because each author is different from the other, unique and unrepeatable. Stones joined by a crystal base that recalls the color of the Costa Smeralda and its renewed appointment with contemporary culture.

LP