Premio Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia

In the face of the death and the suffering of millions of people, what kind of relevance does art have?

Friuli, 1917. Nilo Boschini, a young history of art professor, is in charge of saving the works of art in danger of being destroyed on the Italian front. Among them there are the masterpieces by Giambattista Tiepolo, a much-loved artist, who received his first major commissions there back in the 18th century.

Marquise Solferina Zender is also not there to fight: she wants to support her homeland as a Red Cross nurse, but she’s deluded by war propaganda, which in no way corresponds the reality of war. Her encounter with Nilo, in that dark hour of the country, will change both their lives.

This World War I version of Monuments Men is both a powerful depiction of wartime that lets the reader actually hear the terrifying sound of the bombings – walls shattering all over, dust and dirt covering everything – and a delicate and insightful portrait of a great artist and his work, so vividly told that you can almost see it. Melania G. Mazzucco creates a masterfully orchestrated story in which the irreversibility of historical events and the consequent human tragedy alternate with the artistic parable of one of the greatest painters of the 18th century. And poses the reader a complex question: in the face of the death and the suffering of millions of people, what kind of relevance does art have?