Strega Prize 2023, Ada d’Adamo wins with “Come d’aria”

The Nymphaeum chatters. He awaited the announcement of the winning novel of the seventy-seventh edition of the Premio Strega, Like air of Ada d’Adamo, with cheerful apprehension. There are few octogenarians, numerous splendid fifty-year-olds, not a few thirty-year-olds. No buffet (it was the one that attracted octogenarians, especially from the center, the princesses of the Great Beauty). He is served drinks and awful sticky ice cream sundaes. There was a gala dinner, the first in the history of the award, for a few, at the Caffè delle Arti, a few steps from the Nymphaeum, complete with a “transfer” to the award ceremony afterwards.

Vittorio Sgarbi arrives from the main entrance. Just with a couple of friends. It used to come to an end. He goes towards Minister Sangiuliano. They don’t sit close.

A minute later Francesco Piccolo arrives, with a flower on his heart. He says: «It’s for Ada». Ada D’Adamo, the winner. Mario Martone, also for Ada, “a lifelong friend,” she says. At the first counting, the only applause starts when Geppi Cucciari mentions her name.

Between the tables, the speeches overheard: one, the strike of the vehicles. Two, holidays yes, no, if so where and with whom. Three, the seance. Much was told about it over a few aperitifs, on some chat: at the end of June, the forces of the other world were questioned about the final outcome, by one of the two contending factions (it is the Witch of bipolarity, last year it was was that of extra-parliamentarism, having won, with almost unanimous acclaim, the novel by Mario Desiati, Spatriati, or «the irregular ones, the unclassifiable»). Last year, Desiati dedicated his Strega to Mariateresa Dilascia, who won the Strega in 1995, and died before being able to collect it. An impressive circularity.

Victory, months ago, had been given for certain to Rosella Postorino with Mi Limitavo ad amare te (Feltrinelli), the only novel – it has been emphasized on several occasions – that invents a story (and sets it in History, precisely during the in Bosnia, also present last year in the top five with And then we’ll be safe by Alessandra Carati, Mondadori). Her book revolves around the human impossibility of freeing oneself from the fact that, to a certain extent, what protects us, kills us, and if it doesn’t kill us, it changes us, rapes us. Postorino says: «It is the very contradiction of existence: sooner or later, the life that has been given to us will kill us».

The death of Ada D’Adamo, who won with Come d’aria (Elliott), changed everything. D’Adamo, a dance scholar and dancer, died on April 1, of the disease she wrote about in her book about her, after having spent a lifetime looking after her daughter, also seriously ill, now without a mother. Her death turned the tables, reignited the competition, created a war between good and evil, and good was Adam’s vote.

Previously, the other possible contender had been Romana Petri with Stealing the Night (Mondadori), a highly fictionalized biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. But the Witch, for years, seems happy to push Mondadori to the last places (the last sensational relegation was that of Teresa Ciabatti, in 2021, with It seemed beauty, initially given as the winner and then even finished out of the five). The other two finalists, Andrea Canobbio (The night crossing, The Ship of Theseus) and Maria Grazia Calandrone (Where you didn’t take me, Einaudi), competed to participate. It hadn’t been so clear for some time.

Stefano Petrocchi’s direction has given many surprises for years. Petrocchi did to Strega what Amadeus did to Sanremo: he widened its boundaries, sometimes through quota mechanisms that did good for the mystery and bad for the pressures of the big publishers, now less and less effective. It’s been pretty emotional for a while now. In the essay Witch Hunt. Anatomy of a literary prize (Nottetempo), the critic Gianluigi Simonetti writes that the bewitched selection perfectly represents the mutation of literary criticism: entrusted more and more to “journalists of custom, spin doctors and other writers”, he prefers books that have a strong emotional impact and which ensure “universal entertainment”, neglecting the aspects of style, language, invention. Are the novels in the Strega final the measure of Italian literature or of Italian literary criticism? Should literary criticism influence writing? If that were the case, it would be terrible: literary criticism simply has to see and explain what is happening. And it happens that only non-genre books, but fiction books, which enter the rankings without the help of TikTok, TV, and influencers, are required to tell the story of something in which we can all find ourselves, and that something has to do with life, which for the writer is literature.

Whether D’Adamo’s victory was assigned to his story or writing: that’s the crux. Between life and writing there is, perhaps, no more mediation. There are laces. And it is the new horizon that we must observe.