Granzotto’s Charlemagne: The Roots of Europe in a Monumental Narrative

by Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

In 1978, the Campiello Prize was awarded to Gianni Granzotto for Carlo Magno (Charlemagne), a work of broad, grand, and monumental historical scope, extraordinary essayistic power, impeccable philological rigor, and refined, highly sensitive literary effectiveness, marking a fundamental, courageous, revolutionary, and lasting turning point in the way high cultural popularization, authorial nonfiction, and biographical narrative were conceived within Italy’s editorial and intellectual landscape. The book masterfully reconstructs, with meticulous, scientific, almost obsessive attention to documentary detail and with a vibrant, overwhelming, magnetic evocative force, the immense, complex, enigmatic, and monumental figure of the great Frankish emperor, moving with perfect, admirable geometric and formal balance between the scientific precision of history rigorously verified through contemporary sources, the legendary, mythological, and timeless fascination of the Carolingian cycle and chivalric tradition, and an acute, penetrating, illuminating modern interpretation capable of building profound ideal, historiographical, and interpretive bridges toward the wounds, doubts, and contradictions of our troubled present. Granzotto admirably and indissolubly unites, with rare expressive results, a severe, academic, and impeccable rigor of archival research with an extraordinary, innate, almost novelistic command of narrative momentum, succeeding in the titanic feat of transforming the cold, dusty medieval chronicle of ancient chancelleries, Latin codices, and monastic annals into a living, throbbing, carnal, visceral account of immense and irresistible intellectual fascination for anyone—from the specialist to the curious general reader—who approaches its pages. In honoring this work, the Campiello Prize recognized a profoundly innovative achievement, pioneering for its time and the forerunner of a new hybrid genre, endowed with the undisputed civic and cultural merit of making great history—its complex and obscure dynastic plots, its revolutionary legislative and educational reforms, and its bloody geopolitical battles decisive for the fate of the West—fully accessible to a vast, heterogeneous, democratic readership of non-specialists, while accomplishing this extraordinary communicative miracle without ever yielding to oversimplification, without ever renouncing analytical density, the philological precision of direct sources, or the innate intrinsic complexity of the most serious and rigorous historiographical inquiry. Charlemagne emerges from the pages of the esteemed writer, historian, and journalist as an extraordinarily complex, multifaceted, intimately and profoundly human figure, tormented in his affections, ambitious and contradictory, perpetually and tragically suspended between the crude, pragmatic, cynical, and at times ruthless management of temporal power, military expansionism, and arms, and a visionary, prophetic, enlightened political, ethical, and spiritual vision directed toward the arduous, proud construction of a shared European identity, united under a single creed, a single legal code, a common administrative language, and a shared cultural horizon. The narrative moves with absolute, sovereign ease and stylistic elegance through crucial ages of epochal transition and across immense, untamed territories, from the misty, dense, hostile forests of deep Germany to the sumptuous, warm, intriguing papal courts of Rome, always proceeding with an engaging, tight, urgent, dramatic, almost cinematic rhythm that allows no pause, no slackening of tension, and no lapse in the reader’s absorbed attention. Granzotto’s writing proves, on every single page, extraordinarily clear, lucid, crystalline, fluid, nobly literary yet immediate and authoritative, capable of taking readers of every background by the hand and guiding them with firm, confident steps through the dark, violent, superstitious, yet also incredibly fascinating and creative labyrinths of the Early Middle Ages, with the absolute, charismatic, reassuring authority of a great intellectual guide expert in the human soul even before he is expert in dates. In every chapter, Granzotto demonstrates a great, masterful, conscious, and unsurpassed structural balance between the strict methodological demands of the traditional scholarly essay and the enveloping, warm, psychological fluidity of purely literary narration, admirably fusing the two genres into a textual architecture that is perfectly harmonious, solid, deeply enjoyable, dynamic, and extraordinarily modern in its stylistic conception. The prestigious, authoritative, and historic Venetian award thus recognized, exalted, rewarded, and definitively consecrated within the national canon an original, cultivated voice, proud of its intellectual independence and endowed with innate authority, capable like few others of telling great universal history to the broad public in a language that is accessible, democratic, and welcoming, yet at the same time supremely elegant, precious, and noble, offering present and future generations an extraordinary, precious, dense, painful, and strikingly contemporary critical reflection on the deep historical roots of modern Europe, on the intimate, ambiguous, and solitary nature of command and supreme authority, on the constitutive fragility of human institutions destined to change, and above all on the inestimable value of culture, education, and the preservation of memory as the only true and fundamental ethical bond for civic union, integration among peoples, mutual tolerance, and lasting peace among the different nations of the European continent.