The five finalists of the 2024 Campiello Prize, a contemporary Italian fiction competition promoted by the Il Campiello Foundation – Confindustria Veneto, now in its 62nd edition, were voted at the Palazzo del Bo in Padua. This is the five: The fire that you carry inside (Marsilio) by Antonio Franchini; The House of the Magician (Ponte alle Grazie) by Emanuele Trevi; Locus desperatus (Einaudi) by Michele Mari (second round); Alma (Feltrinelli) by Federica Manzon (third vote); It spreads everywhere (Laterza) by Vanni Santoni (fifth vote). The winner will be announced on September 21st at the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice. «The expansion of culture has led to the decrease of excellent singularities. If I think about those who won the Campiello in the ’60s and ’70s, if I listen to music, if I read essays I find extraordinary points. Today we have a swarm of medium-high literary authors but there are no peaks.” Thus the singer-songwriter, writer and teacher Roberto Vecchioni, member of the jury of the 2024 Campiello Prize, during the selection ceremony. It would seem and would be a useless laudatio of times gone by, if it weren’t for a detail that Professor Roberto Vecchioni should also underline in other contexts, for example television programs in which everyone is beautiful, good and “brilliant”. The singer-songwriter, teacher of Italian, Latin and Greek in prestigious schools such as the Beccaria high school in Milan, in fact puts his finger on the wound: the failure of mass education. Culture for all is an excellent idea but if it implies the collapse of quality then it becomes suicide. Precisely what we have before our eyes: cookie-cutter novels, poets who don’t know what a verse is, “testimony” non-fiction, that is, without scientific evidence, therefore useless if not harmful. It’s no surprise: what can you oppose to a national program which, until a few years ago, asked the teacher not to impose but to help the student develop awareness of grammatical rules? What do you want to do if the subjects at a certain point become teaching units that proceed by topic? The students developed the awareness that Petrarca and Leopardi are… contemporaries because they both talk about love. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, there was an exceptional season of Italian culture. In literary studies there were still or was still alive the memory of intellectuals such as Contini, De Robertis, Avalle, Dionisotti, Pasquali, Segre, Roncaglia, Caretti, Petrocchi. Today you can graduate without ever having heard of them. The mass university, first, and then the distinction, foolish for the humanistic disciplines, between a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, undermined a model of knowledge that required elbow grease and was not within everyone’s reach. Since the 1960s, some critics have theorized that it is the transmission belt between the publishing industry and readers. Result: critics have become publishers’ useful idiots. The sense of hierarchy was well developed: one was not worth one.
Every in-depth study has been sacrificed on the (falsely democratic) altar of everything for everyone, and if that everything is in reality mediocre and provincial, amen, the rich have time on their hands, they go to private universities and move abroad.
