by Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

In 1971, the Premio Campiello was awarded to Gianna Manzini for Ritratto in piedi, a novel of extraordinary and intense memorial force that stands as one of the pinnacles of Italian introspective literature. The work is a deeply moving yet lucid tribute to the figure of her father, Giuseppe Manzini, who becomes the central axis and emotional compass of the author’s life and writing. Through a fragmented, restless, and profoundly evocative prose, Manzini reconstructs a private memory that, driven by an urgent inner necessity, transforms into a universal reflection on filial bonds and identity. In this instance, the Campiello honors an entirely original voice, capable of merging autobiography and literature in a stylistic experiment where chronological time dissolves completely, giving way to an uninterrupted flow of memories, images, and emotions. The paternal figure emerges from the pages with iconic power, oscillating between the concreteness of historical presence and the rarefaction of absence, making the book both a funeral elegy and a tireless search for shared truth. The novel confirms the strength of an intimate and refined writing that does not shy away from confronting the most painful folds of the past in order to restore dignity to a man and to an ideal. Manzini transforms the pain of loss into a form of poetic knowledge, demonstrating that the narration of the self can become a mirror of the moral tensions of an entire era. In this setting, the Venetian lagoon becomes the witness to a triumph of memory, where the written word acts as a tool of restoration against the erosion of time. The readers’ jury grasped the nobility of this inner excavation, recognizing in the work a disarming sincerity that elevates the biographical detail into a paradigm of the human condition. Every line of Ritratto in piedi vibrates with an ethical tension that compels the reader to question the meaning of coherence and sacrifice, turning the father figure into a symbol of intellectual resistance. Manzini does not write a simple family chronicle, but constructs a cathedral of words in which each stone is a fragment of lived and suffered experience. The success of this book demonstrates how the Campiello remains attentive to works that unite formal experimentation with emotional depth, never yielding to the ease of sentimentality. Through this victory, Italian literature rediscovers the value of the fragment and poetic intuition as tools for mapping the complex territory of human relationships. The work still stands today as an unsurpassed example of how prose can become music and autobiography can become universal art, capable of speaking to anyone who has sought, in the face of a parent, the roots of their own existence. The recognition of Gianna Manzini reaffirms the mission of the prize: to give voice to those who can transform the silence of the past into a courageous and necessary song, one that remains impressed upon the reader’s mind like a portrait that refuses to fade.

PATRIZIA RIELLO PERA – SCRITTRICE E DISEGNATRICE