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The International Literary Prize Viareggio-Rèpaci is a literary award founded in 1929 by Leonida Rèpaci, in Viareggio. The inauguration party for the Prize was attended by lots of important people, including Luigi Pirandello and Massimo Bontempelli.

The first edition was won on equal merit by Lorenzo Viani and Anselmo Bucci. The Viareggio Rèpaci Prize is dedicated to works written in Italian by authors of Italian nationality, published in the period between 1st June of the previous year and 31st May of the current year and it is divided into three sections: "Fiction", "Poetry" and "Non-fiction". The announcement of the winners takes place in Viareggio during summer[1].

Observing the list of the winners of the Prize we can trace the names of loads of authors who marked the history of Italian literature of the twentieth century. Among these we remember: Umberto Saba, Antonio Gramsci, Aldo Palazzeschi, Elsa Morante and lots of others that have given prestige to Italian poetry and fiction.

Michele Sovente won the Rèpaci Prize in 1998, in the section "Poetry", with the work Cumae (Marsilio), which also earned him the recognition from the critic. The winners of the "Fiction" and "Non-fiction" sections, were respectively Giorgio Pressburger with La neve e la colpa (Einaudi) and Carlo Ginzburg with Occhiacci di legno (Feltrinelli).

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Things speak … So many languages does the soul speak.

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That’s what a fragment, among the most intense of Cumae, says. All the languages of the world, Sovente says, are useful to interpret the infinite voices of the soul, to give sound and form to a reality that reveals itself inexhaustible from the very moment the breath of our humanity makes it alive: so every time a language dies it is a part of the soul of the world that disappears with it.

With Cumae, the phase of artistic maturity of the poet starts. Here he uses three different languages linked together by kin:

 

• Italian, our national language;

• the Cappellese dialect, the language of his nest.

• Latin, the great language of our past, from which the other two derive.

 

 

 

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[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Viareggio.