Mario Rigoni Stern Prize for multilingual literature of the Alps: Paolo Malaguti wins with "Il Moro della cima"

Paolo Malaguti wins the 2022 edition of the Mario Rigoni Stern Prize with the book "Il Moro della cima".

PRESS RELEASE OF 2/9/2022 - Mario Rigoni Stern Award, Communication Office

It is Paolo Malaguti with "Il Moro della cima" published by Einaudi to win the XII edition of the Mario Rigoni Stern Prize for multilingual literature of the Alps.

The jury announced its decision during the award ceremony – on the evening of Friday, September 2, 2022 – at the Palazzo dei Congressi delle Fiere in Riva del Garda in Trentino.

Malaguti got the better of the other authors vying for the victory: Carlo Barbante with "Scritto nel ghiaccio. 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).

Also during the ceremony was awarded the Guardian of the Ark Award – Osvaldo Dongilli, this year attributed to the Bees, an irreplaceable insect for the conservation of biodiversity, whose number in recent years is experiencing a sharp decline. To collect the award was the entomologist and beekeeper Paolo Fontana, President of the World Biodiversity Association.

The jury composed of Sara Luchetta, Giuseppe Mendicino, Luca Mercalli, Annibale Salsa and Niccolò Scaffai has thus motivated the choices of the Stern Prize 2022.

As for the winning work, the jury's motivation was as follows: "With "Il Moro della Cima" Paolo Malaguti collects stories and voices of the past to return them with careful and living writing through the figure of Moro Frun, a three-dimensional character in love with the mountain, which reminds us of the Tönle Bintarn by Mario Rigoni Stern, with his comings and goings, his love for the mother land and the pain for 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 talk about the changes of the Venetian mountain, worked, transformed and sometimes disfigured by the human hand; they speak of a war of which we still read the traces in the landscape and which reminds us of the injustice of all wars, those of yesterday and those of our days. They speak of a disappeared peasant civilization, which emerges between the lines with words, objects, miseries, ways of saying and thinking.
This book by Paolo Malaguti makes us imagine that the 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: Mario Rigoni Stern, Luigi Meneghello, Andrea Zanzotto, Tina Merlin and many others and others, is still alive and strong. Il Moro and its author descend from there, from that passion of "virtue and knowledge". The opposite of that progress that increasingly tightens the plains and mountains of Veneto, that bends the consciences of intellectual courtiers, that betrays the memory of what has been. This book gives hope that a more serious and civilized world is still possible."

On learning of the victory, Paolo Malaguti, said: "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 is him. But alongside the 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 he was now a consecrated author".

The Guardian of the Ark – Osvaldo Dongilli award was this year awarded to the Bees, withdrawn by the entomologist and beekeeper Paolo Fontana, with this motivation: "The perfect insect is the bee (...) without them our land would become an 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. Unfortunately, however, they are in danger: all research institutes in the world agree that a process of extinction of this insect, or at least of many of the 20 thousand known species, is underway: ensuring bees environmental conditions that allow them to live and reproduce 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 reports of the finalist works:

CARLO BARBANTE, Scritto nel ghiaccio (Il Mulino edizioni)

"With "Written in the ice" the Venetian chemist "Carlo Barbante accompanies us on a journey from the Alps to the polar caps to discover the climatic secrets of the past contained in snow and ancient ice. A theme that would have thrilled MRS, so attentive to the observation of the winter environment. The scientific epic, narrated in the first person by the author who has attended remote Antarctic research bases with a very severe climate, also assumes an ethical value that resonates with two other MRS reference points: environmental and climate protection and concord between peoples, well highlighted by 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 small great joys of mountain research. What 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 moment 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 the master? The research with the wildlife of the Pyrenees brings us back to our Alps and to the interest that Mario Rigoni Stern has always had towards wild animals, protagonists of many stories and fundamental elements of mountain ecosystems".

ANNALINA MOLTENI, L'ombra dei Walser (Ed. Monterosa).

"The "Walser Question" has attracted the attention of scholars for fifty years. 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 conjunctures - are the protagonists of her novel "The shadow of the Walser". The author with fluid and compelling writing describes characters and places 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 in a new and original perspective. The novel fully captures the spirit of the Prize in highlighting an important aspect of the multifaceted Alpine culture. A civilization that manifests itself through the presence of niche linguistic minorities within the varied geographical space of the Alps of which the cimbri of MarioRigoni Stern themselves are an expression".

Finally, a special mention went to Ulderica Da Pozzo for the book "Femines. Donne del latte", ed. Forum.