Italian Language Blog

To follow on from my previous Premio Bancarella blog, today I’m going to explain how the competition actually works.

What makes the Premio Bancarella unique amongst Italian book prizes is the fact that it’s not awarded by a jury of critics, but is completely organised by booksellers from all over the country, including the Canton Ticino, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. For this reason the prize is held in high consideration by publishers and writers because the booksellers are seen as sensitive interpreters of readers’ preferences. “Il più scoperto, il meno ipocrita che ci sia in Italia — ha scritto Vittorio Sgarbi, vincitore nel ‘90 con Davanti all’immagine – si vince con orgoglio” (“The most open, the least hypocritical that there is in Italy – wrote Vittorio Sgarbi, who won the prize in 1990 with Davanti all’immagine – it’s won with pride”).

How it works is quite convoluted and typically ‘Italian style’: between September and February every year the bookseller members of the Premio Bancarella flag up the most popular books to the Comitato (committee) of the Premio (prize). From these books the Comitato draws up an initial shortlist for Il Premio Bancarella. The books can be either libri di narrativa (fictional books) or di saggististica (non fictional), and the authors do not need to be Italian as long as their book has been translated into the Italian language. It’s important that the book must have been newly published in Italy between March of the previous year and the February of the year in which the prize is awarded. Furthermore, the writer must be alive at the time of the publishing, and he or she must not have won the prize in the previous five years. 

The publishers of the initially shortlisted books must donate 100 copies (only one book per publisher can be selected) and make a contribution towards the expenses for the organization of the prize. Shortlisted writers must promise to be present at the award, and that they will take part in the promotional campaign. Once all these criteria are met, the final 6 books are shortlisted in April, and a promotional campaign begins in bookshops all over the country. For the final vote, the Comitato selects a maximum of 200 booksellers who are each given a voting form with the 6 shortlisted titles. These 200 booksellers have the responsibility of making the final decision about who should be awarded the prize!

On the penultimate weekend of July, the 200 selected booksellers, the 6 writers, their publishers, plus a plethora of local and national artists, politicians and intellectuals meet up in Pontremoli in Piazza della Repubblica, where at nine o’clock in the evening a notaio (solicitor) opens the 200 envelops containing their anonymous votes, thereby revealing the winner of that year’s Premio Bancarella. On Sunday the 22nd of July 2012 Pontremoli hosted the 60th Premio Bancarella, and the prize was awarded to Marcello Simoni for his first novel “Il Mercante di Libri Maledetti”, with 97 votes out of a total of 194. Second, with 80 votes, came Marco Buticchi with  “La voce del destino”, followed by the Swedish writer Björn Larsson and his “I poeti non scrivono gialli”. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Simoni’s book, but it sounds very interesting and I want to get hold of it soon. I’ll let you know what it’s like!

You can find a list of all the winners on the official website: http://www.premiobancarella.info/

Pontremoli and its surrounding territory, la Lunigiana, which is located in the northern tip of Toscana, has always been a point of departure for emigration towards the north of Italy and abroad. Amongst these emigrants there is a particular “species”, unique to this area, called i librai della Lunigiana (the Lunigiana booksellers), who have been plying their trade since time immemorial. They were already well known in the Nineteenth Century, before the unification of Italy, when both il Granducato di Toscana and il Ducato di Parma were under Austrian dominion.

Every Spring  whole families would leave their villages, the two most famous being Montereggio and Mulazzo,  and meet together on the Passo della Cisa, the main pass between Pontremoli and Parma on the Appennino Tosco Emiliano. There they would divide up the various marketing territories amongst themselves in order not to create unfair competition, and share information about where to get hold of cheap books to sell. With the little money that they made from selling chestnuts and cheese (traditional to Lunigiana), they would get fondi di magazzino (end of line books) from the publishers, who even produced special ‘economical’ books for them, badly bound, and printed with worn-out characters on cheap paper. These forerunners of the cut price paperback were known as pontremolesi.

Once they had managed to fill up their gerle (baskets) with books and other saleable objects, i bancarellai lunigianesi (the bookstall owners from Lunigiana) would head down to the important towns where they would set up their bancarelle (stalls) under the porches, and sell prints, calendars, prayer books and copies of Italian and foreign classics to passers by. These librai lunigianesi were almost illiterate, but they had a sixth sense for  choosing the right books. Year after year they would come back to the same place to sell their wares, and by the end of the Nineteenth Century many of them had become wealthy enough to open important bookshops in most of the towns in central northern Italy. Some even set up bookshop in countries such as Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, and France, where they had emigrated from Lunigiana.

In 1952 a meeting of the descendants of these old bancarellai was organised in Lunigiana. At the meeting, friends and relatives who had not seen each others for decades, met up again. And whilst sitting together and eating traditional local food and drinking local wine they came up with the idea of setting up the Premio Bancarella (Book Stall Prize). The first Premio Bancarella  took place in Pontremoli the following year, 1953, where the prize was awarded to Ernest Hemingway for his famous novel “The old man and the sea”. Since then, every penultimate week-end of July without fail,  for just a couple of precious days the sleepy old country town of Pontremoli is transformed into an important cultural centre, and host to illustrious literary guests.