By Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

The Campiello 2011 prize was awarded to Andrea Molesini for Non tutti i bastardi sono di Vienna (Not All Bastards Come from Vienna), a novel of powerful historical and narrative impact, capable of restoring the First World War not as distant schoolbook material, but as a concrete experience of occupation, fear, moral disorder, and the sudden loss of innocence. Set in the Venetian countryside after the defeat of Caporetto, the story enters a residence requisitioned by Austro-Hungarian officers and transforms the domestic space into a field of tension, where war does not remain outside the door, but invades rooms, habits, family hierarchies, and everyday relationships.

Campiello 2011: the war through a young gaze

Molesini entrusts the narration to the gaze of a young protagonist, and it is precisely through that still immature yet increasingly vigilant perspective that History acquires an intimate, physical, almost claustrophobic force. The novel recounts a coming-of-age under siege: to grow up means learning too soon about violence, fear, the ambiguity of feelings, the fragility of honour, and the complexity of the enemy. The writing is rich, precise, and evocative, capable of combining novelistic rhythm and historical density, literary elegance and immediate readability.

In Non tutti i bastardi sono di Vienna, there are no easy oppositions: war cracks every certainty, confuses victims and perpetrators, and forces the characters to confront courage, cowardice, desire, revenge, and survival. The Venetian countryside thus becomes a wounded landscape, crossed by foreign presences, national pride, private resentments, and sudden revelations of humanity. Molesini constructs a solid and refined work, in which the epic of the Great War is brought back to the more unsettling dimension of domestic life and individual conscience. With this recognition, the Campiello Prize honoured a form of fiction capable of blending historical novel, sentimental education, and moral reflection, offering the reader a book in which the past does not console, but powerfully questions the present.

Read also the full list of Campiello Prize winners (in Italian). More reviews by Patrizia Riello Pera at patriziarielloperalibri.it.

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