Sgorlon’s The Wooden Throne: A Masterpiece to Be Rediscovered

by Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

In 1973, the Campiello Prize was awarded to Carlo Sgorlon for Il trono di legno (The Wooden Throne), a novel of sweeping narrative breadth and extraordinary lyrical density that definitively established its author within the landscape of contemporary Italian literature as one of the most compelling interpreters of rural civilization. The work is superbly set in the farming world of Friuli, a borderland at once rugged, proud, and generous. It tells the story of a community deeply rooted in tradition, preserving an invaluable heritage of gestures, beliefs, legends, and archaic rituals that risked disappearing forever under the relentless pressure of industrial modernity and cultural homogenization. Sgorlon masterfully interweaves history and myth, raising local chronicle and the daily life of the fields to a legendary, epic, and timeless dimension. His style is evocative, sumptuous, visionary, and extraordinarily absorbing, capturing the reader from the very first pages and drawing them into a vanished microcosm. In honoring this novel, the Campiello Prize celebrated a form of storytelling intimately bound to place—to its hills, rivers, and protective mists—yet also capable of speaking to all readers through a new and powerful anthropological universality that transcends geographical borders. The novel brilliantly explores the ancestral, almost mythological bond between human beings and nature: an indissoluble relationship made of respect, toil, and reverential awe. It also investigates the enduring tension between a mythologized past and a present looming with irreversible change. Collective memory, understood as the guardian of a people’s deepest secrets, becomes the true central force of the text. It emerges powerfully through intense, proud, at times eccentric, yet always profoundly authentic characters, carved onto the page with the same rough precision as the wood that gives the novel its title. Sgorlon builds a grand choral narrative, rich in magical suggestion, Mitteleuropean-inflected magical realism, biblical echoes, and the resonances of rural epic, where every single voice contributes to a symphonic and polyphonic harmony. The prestigious Venetian award thus recognized and celebrated an original voice, proudly conscious of its cultural otherness and deeply tied to Italy’s purest, most peripheral, and most authentic roots. At the same time, Il trono di legno offers an extraordinary and strikingly contemporary critical reflection on the profound meaning of identity, the priceless value of time recovered through oral storytelling, the dignity of manual labor, and the sacredness of historical origins that, despite everything, continue to nourish and fertilize our disoriented present.