On Saturday, October 10, in the heart of the historic and splendid Santa Caterina museum complex in Treviso, the official awards ceremony for the 44th edition of the Gambrinus Mazzotti Literary Prize took place, an event that brought together hundreds of people, including authors, publishers, institutional representatives, jury members, and culture enthusiasts. All came together to highlight once again the Prize’s ability, originally established in San Polo di Piave, to serve as an expression of an entire region, engaging, day after day, with an ever-wider audience. Present for the occasion were, among others, the Hon. Marina Marchetto Aliprandi; the Mayor of San Polo di Piave, Nicola Fantuzzi; the Mayor of Treviso, Mario Conte; and Vice President Paolo Marcon, to whom President Francesco De Bettin, in a model of integrated leadership aimed at fostering solid dialogue with local institutions, entrusted the representation of the Treviso-Belluno Chamber of Commerce; Marco De Val, as Award Coordinator; and Alessandro Tasinato, Chair of the Award Jury.
The 2026 Gambrinus Mazzotti Award was presented to Roberta Mori for “Svegliarsi adulti. Vita di Sandro Delmastro, partigiano e amico di Primo Levi” in the Mountaineering category, and to Davide Ferrario, author of “L’isola della felicità,” in the Ecology and Landscape category. The Jury’s Special Prize was awarded to “Ghiacciai del Trentino. Ecosistemi di alta quota tra storia e ricerca” (Glaciers of Trentino: High-Altitude Ecosystems Between History and Research), edited by Cristian Ferrari and Alberto Carton. For the Traditional Crafts section, although no winner was selected, the exhibition “Art, Crafts, and Design in Puglia: Tradition, Modernity, and the Future,” curated by Pierpaolo Lala and Lara Gigante, received an honorable mention. Additionally, other works that received honorable mentions include: Linda Cottino with “A Wall All to Herself. The First Female Mountaineers: Seven True Stories,” and Nico Mastropietro with “Vertical K2 Colonialism. 1954: A Mountaineering Feat That Tells the Story of Our Country” for the Mountaineering section; Luca Misculin with “Open Sea: A Human History of the Central Mediterranean” and Paola Peresin with “Slavc’s Journey: Mistakes, Lies, False Myths, and Legends About the Wolf” for the Ecology and Landscape section. Finally, the popular jury of the Council of 20 Readers awarded the special “Readers’ Voice” Prize (the so-called “Super Prize”) to Ferrario’s work “The Island of Happiness.”
The President Francesco de Bettin of the Treviso-Belluno|Dolomiti (Northern Veneto) Chamber of Commerce, however, stated: “The role of a Chamber of Commerce goes beyond simply knowing the local area: it is to create the conditions that allow its potential to flourish. We are therefore proud to have consistently supported the Gambrinus ‘Giuseppe Mazzotti’ Award, one of the most prestigious events on the Italian cultural scene. This award upholds the values of its founder: the protection of the landscape, respect for the environment, the promotion of local traditions, and a passion for knowledge. In its various categories—from the mountains to ecology, from travel to traditional crafts, we are pleased to find the spirit with which we view Northern Veneto through an integrated and complementary vision of the region, where so many diverse local traditions, taken together, form a strategic identity. My thanks go to all the participants for the passion with which they observe and describe reality. If, through your writings, you succeed, even if only in part,in making us look more closely at the landscape and at knowledge, it will be a wonderful gift for all of us.”
