by Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

In 1975, the Campiello Prize was awarded to Stanislao Nievo for Il prato in fondo al mare (The Meadow at the Bottom of the Sea), an extraordinarily fascinating, visionary, erudite, lyrical, and profoundly innovative novel that forcefully projects Italian literature toward new, avant-garde expressive horizons of immense emotional and intellectual impact. The work boldly begins with a real, scientific, oceanographic, and meticulously documented expedition, courageously undertaken by the author himself in the Tyrrhenian Sea in a desperate search for the submerged remains of the steamship Ercole, the historic and ill-fated vessel that mysteriously disappeared at sea in March 1861, carrying his celebrated and beloved ancestor Ippolito Nievo along with the financial documents of the Expedition of the Thousand. Yet this rigorous documentary and archival investigation soon turns, page after page, into a hypnotic, labyrinthine, and all-encompassing inner journey: a metaphysical and existential exploration, a pilgrimage of the soul miraculously suspended between the faithful reconstruction of historical memory and the fertile, dreamlike, visionary drift of the purest fantastic imagination, freed from all earthly bonds. In honoring this novel, the Campiello Prize farsightedly recognized a form of storytelling open to the adventure of spirit, body, and intellect, endowed with a genuinely international and cosmopolitan breadth, and capable of engaging on equal terms with the great myths and masterpieces of world maritime and exploration literature, from the epics of Herman Melville to the abyssal tales of Joseph Conrad. The sea thus becomes the central, absolute, and all-encompassing symbol of the entire narrative structure, appearing not as a mere geographical backdrop, but as an immense liquid mirror of the human unconscious: a place of unfathomable mystery, perpetual biological and spiritual metamorphosis, and above all initiatory and cathartic knowledge, where the ancestral boundaries between life and death, between the visible and the invisible, grow fragile and blurred. With consummate craftsmanship, Nievo builds a dynamic, fluid, enveloping, powerful, and structurally complex narrative, rich in poetic suggestion, mythological echoes, submerged legends, and dazzling lyrical illuminations that seize the reader and draw them into a vortex of continuous discoveries and spiritual epiphanies. The novel masterfully and indissolubly interweaves the author’s complex personal, biographical, and familial history with the collective, political, and traumatic history of a nascent Risorgimento Italy, moving with great evocative force, intellectual lucidity, and a rare, precious ability to transfigure the cold facts of biography and chronicle into a universal and timeless myth. The prestigious and historic Venetian award thus recognized, exalted, and definitively consecrated an original, proud, fascinating, magnetic, and profoundly unconventional voice within twentieth-century literature, one capable of uniting, in perfect balance, the scientific rigor of historical inquiry with the pure vertigo of underwater poetry, offering future generations a timeless meditation on human destiny, the redemptive power of memory, the painful search for one’s roots of blood, and the unfathomable, dark, and wondrous mystery that has lain for centuries at the bottom of our individual and collective existence.

PATRIZIA RIELLO PERA – SCRITTRICE E DISEGNATRICE