By Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

The Campiello 2016 prize was awarded to Simona Vinci for La prima verità (The First Truth), a novel of impressive narrative and psychological power, capable of confronting madness not as a mere literary theme, but as an extreme territory in which the violence of institutions, the fragility of bodies, society’s fear of difference, and the desperate need for a truth that can finally be spoken are revealed. The work leads the reader between Italy and Greece, above all to the island of Leros, a place marked by history and by the horror of psychiatric confinement, where for decades excluded human beings — the ill, dissidents, the poor, and the forgotten — were consigned to a radical form of abandonment.

Campiello 2016: a restless, many-voiced novel

Vinci constructs a stratified, restless narrative, crossed by multiple voices, times, and registers, without seeking the reassuring linearity of traditional storytelling: her material is broken, painful, fragmentary, just as broken are the lives she attempts to bring back into the light. The strength of the novel arises precisely from this tension between document and vision, between historical memory and emotional immersion, between the search for reality and the awareness that every profound truth also passes through trauma, the body, silence, hallucination, and collective shame. In La prima verità, madness is neither spectacle nor convenient allegory: it is the concrete experience of exclusion, a language deformed by pain, the place where society deposits what it does not wish to recognise in itself.

Simona Vinci’s writing is powerful, physical, and courageous, capable of alternating harshness and compassion, lucidity and vertigo, historical reconstruction and visionary intensity. The novel questions the boundary between care and violence, normality and imprisonment, testimony and invention, asking the reader not to remain outside, but to take on the burden of looking. With this recognition, the Campiello Prize honoured an original and necessary voice in contemporary Italian fiction, capable of transforming a removed history into a work of the highest ethical tension, where literature becomes an act of memory, a descent into shadow, and an extreme attempt to restore dignity to those who were erased.

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

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