"Federica Manzon's 'Alma' wins the Campiello Prize

Second place, with 78 votes, Antonio Franchini in Il fuoco che ti porti dentro (Marsilio). A book in which the author invited readers to get to know his mother 'as I used to do with friends I invited to dinner to give them an extreme experience', he writes, slyly. Angela, a woman who embodies all the worst of Italianism: 'qualunquism, racism, classism, egoism, opportunism, transformism, half-culture worse than ignorance, rancour'. Angela who wished to play a non-conformist and incorrect part, who 'to be a character forced the tones, she overplayed her hand, she exaggerated by abdicating all delicacy, stepping on the stage of life with fury'. Angela, who like her mother used to repeat "Io nun vaco a' casa 'e nisciuno", I don't go to anyone's house, translates her son, "as if to say that they don't need their neighbours and no one can force them to do the thing that they are most repulsed by: dealing with other human beings. As another of their favourite maxims suggests: "I don't want to be compared to anyone!"'. The result is an impassioned and subtle book, overflowing with a humanity that is fragile and aggressive, smelly and in its own way candid, full of inventiveness, life force and wickedness, which the author ends up loving madly, tenderly, tragically, and we with him (hoping for a next book that also investigates this love - 'I fear that all loves are somehow wrong', he writes, towards the end).

Third Emanuele Trevi, author of C a magician's house (Ponte alle Grazie), which received 66 votes. "You know a smooth cliff, overlooking the sea? That's how your father is if he doesn't want to listen to you. He offers no footholds,' Trevi's mother said to her son, speaking of his father Mario, the famous and impenetrable Jungian psychoanalyst, adding the usual refrain 'you know what he's like'. "You are mismatched. An adult who doesn't ever care about others and a child who is always with his head in the clouds,' she once told him that - worried that her nine-year-old son would get lost in Venice with his father - she wanted to put enough fear into him so that he wouldn't get distracted. The magician's house is his father's, where the author goes to live after he dies and is unable to sell it. After all, since childhood, he cared about being close to him, being his shadow. The house, and Jung's reading, become sources of his father's memory and allow the author to come to terms with that enigmatic and cumbersome presence, in its 'autocratic sovereignty', as well as with himself and reality, which his father tried to grasp through art and psychoanalysis.

There is also talk of houses in the book that came fourth place, that of Michele Mari. At the centre of his novel, Locus desperatus (Einaudi), is a man who lives for objects, who has delegated his memory and identity to the things he owns. Mari declines this interesting idea in a fantastic dimension. The protagonist, like the author a compulsive collector, one day notices a thin cross traced with chalk on his door. He erases it and the cross returns, and with it strange characters appear who seem to come out of a parallel world and force him to evict them from his 'den-museum'. He had hoped that, in time, it would give him back his soul parts. What will become of him once he loses the things he had designated to represent him?

Fifth placed Vanni Santoni with Dilaga ovunque (Laterza), a novel-essay that takes us into the world of graffiti, and of street art, asking what drives man - since the dawn of time, since Palaeolithic men painted what is called the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory, Lascaux - towards painting, and in particular wall painting.

Over the years, the Camiello Prize has taken several versions. TheCampiello Natura - Venice Gardens Foundations Prize was created last year and in this edition awarded Emanuela Evangelista, a researcher and activist who for the past 12 years has lived in a vilage of 15 stilt houses on a tributary of the Rio Negro, itself a tributary of the Amazon, deep in the primary forest. She is the author of Amazonia. A life in the heart of the forest (Laterza).

"An exciting and well-documented account of the present state of the world's largest forest: a lung or heart that feeds the whole planet (indeed, the biome) with its breath or pulsation and that the whole planet has a responsibility to rescue from the catastrophe to which it is now exposed. The danger of deforestation and the irresponsible use of natural resources are denounced in this book with the objectivity of the scientist and the passion of the activist, who gives the floor not only to measurable data but also to the self-awareness, which has been growing in recent years, of the people who inhabit these lands, in a reportage that deserves to be read and meditated upon,' wrote the jury.

"Forest dwellers do not talk about the forest, they say 'we are the forest'. So I say 'we do not inhabit the Planet, we are the Planet'," Evangelist said, to emphasise how that giant biome is an essential part of our lives.

Paolo Rumiz, who won the lifetime achievement award, also lives in a small village. 'I live in a village of 80 inhabitants in Slovenia, close to the border,' he said, 'and I see migrants, Ukrainian refugees, Afghans, and now, the latest wave, the Bengalis, pass by every day. The border is a fundamental seismograph of so many things that happen. We have arrived at a time in our history when we are in danger of losing many freedoms, it is no longer enough to make literature, we must do something broader, to make narrative, to make words available to say something different, not to respond with our gut but with our intellect and heart. Humanising a dialogue that is becoming increasingly virtual'.

The Campiello junior was instead awarded to Angelo Petrosino with Un bambino, una gatta e un cane, illustrated by Sara Not for Einaudi Ragazzi and to Daniela Palumbo with La notte più bella (Piemme). "It is our responsibility to teach the new generations to use words with relevance and happiness, relevance to be responsible people, and happiness to develop imagination and build futures. Rewarding those who know how to write for children means stimulating responsible citizenship, the ability to be together: identity is built through relationships, it is not looking in the mirror, it is talking. Two books were awarded that insist on these themes: they experience reality, they deal with the relationship with animals, they work on imagination and awareness," said Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation, which sponsors this section of the award.

Instead, Fiammetta Palpati won the Campiello Opera prima with the novel La casa delle orfane bianche (Laurana Editore).

Giulia Arnoldi is the winner of the Campiello Giovani, the competition reserved for young people aged between 15 and 21, with the short story Just before the last deal .