Radio Papesse

The LUCIA Award consists of

1st prize = € 2.500,00
2nd prize = € 1.000,00

The prizes will be distributed in two segments:

• the first segment within one week from the announcement of the winners,
• the second segment when the work is submitted (no later than June 2021)
 

The works produced will be:

• presented at LUCIA Festival 2021,
• published on radiopapesse.org,
• published on ADN’s digital storytelling platform (online in 2022).

Participants must:

• fill out the registration form together with:

1.the payment receipt of a € 10,00 donation to Radio Papesse (to help us covering the administrative costs associated to the prize) by Paypal or bank transfer to: 

Unicredit Banca
Agenzia: Firenze Nazario Sauro
IBAN: IT 06 J 02008 02836 000401118520 
BIC SWIFT: UNCRITM1F13

2. a description of the project (max 2000 characters),
3. a cv/portfolio including a detailed description of the audio productions created and a link allowing the jury to listen to at least a preview.

Registrations, complete with project proposals, must be send to the address premiolucia@radiopapesse.org no later than November 13^th, 2020 at 11 p.m.

Note: When participants send the registration form, they will receive a link to access some extracts of the selected diaries, in order to have a more precise idea of the stories. We therefore invite participants to send the registration form as soon as possible, in order to have enough time to read the diaries and formulate their proposals within the deadline.

For any doubts or questions, write to premiolucia@radiopapesse.org.

The winners will be announced December 13^th, 2020, during the LUCIA Festival. The jury’s comments will be published on luciafestival.org.

The jury is made up of:

Radio Papesse | Ilaria Gadenz and Carola Haupt
ADN | Natalia Cangi, Martina Magri, Tiziano Bonini

The National Diary Archive Foundation (Archivio Diaristico Nazionale - ADN) Pieve Santo Stefano was founded in 1984 by Saverio Tutino, and collects testimonies of popular/folk writing – diaries, epistolaries, autobiographical memoirs. ADN has assembled over 8.000 works, which are both literary exercise and historical testimony, narration brought to life by references to common memory, a precious documentation of our recent past. Today, Pieve Santo Stefano is recognized as the city of the diary, and the Pieve Award, an annual competition dedicated to autobiographical popular/folk writing, has created a community made up of diarists, enthusiasts, scholars of history and literature, artists and innovators. The ADN Foundation, born in 1991, aims to promote and disseminate the stories kept by the National Diary Archive.

1 Ivano Cipriani | The path to personal liberation of a young Balilla who frees himself from the (Fascist) regime thanks to the sound of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet during the Liberation.

Rome, 1926. Ivano was born in the capital to an anti-fascist family from Tuscany. He’s an only child and lives with six other adults: aunts and uncles, grandparents and an older cousin. The family showers him with attention, care, love. They want him to have a certain position in society, and to protect him in such a hostile political climate, they accept that he becomes a Balilla. Ivan’s mind, still young and innocent, is shaped by the regime’s methods.
This diary traces the itinerary of his unintentional involvement and analyses the mechanisms aimed at generating youth adherence to Fascism. Through friendships, reading, romance and especially music, which comes from America along with the liberating troops, Ivano discovers that he prefers the soft sounds of the blues to the black kit of the Balilla and the strictness of the parades. The break occurs in an instant, the exact moment when he hears Louis Armstrong’s trumpet for the first time. The sound of that trumpet incites him to revolt.
From that moment, Ivano begins his personal liberation, and that underground rebellion of youth, with time, gains a political dimension. Ivano arrives at Communism, precisely that Communism his parents wanted to protect him from to guarantee him a future.

2 Raffaele Favero | A unique and touching new interpretation of a 1970s hippie youth’s land journey towards
the Orient, 1967.

Milan, 1967. Raffaele is 22 years old and lives in Milan with his family. He studied science in high school, but doesn’t want to go to university. He’s in a music band (the Prophets), reads and gets interested in the Orient, like many his age.
In autumn ’67, Raffaele decides to leave everything and go, to search for himself and maybe a greater truth, unsatisfied with the bourgeois life offered in Milan, a city too stifling for him.
So, he starts up his Citroën 2CV and begins his journey. Going to India by land is a common practice for the youth of that era, but Raffaele interprets this trend in a profoundly personal way: before India, he meets Afghanistan and falls in love. He stays there for a long time, then returns at the end of his journey, settles there and lives as he can (and continues to ask for money from home). He learns Pashtu and converts to Islam, which he follows as a religion of peace, fraternity and happiness. He makes friends with the mujaheddin and lives among them, turning into Raffiulah. When he goes back to Milan, he returns full of sorrow, for after
that journey his heart will always be elsewhere. A few years later, he meets Jill, an Australian girl who shares his passion for the Middle East. They fall in love, get married, move to Australia and have three children, never forgoing their life on fire. In 1980, Raffaele returns to Afghanistan to gather internal information on the resistance to the Soviet invasion. He goes back and forth from Australia, where his wife and children live, but he doesn’t return from his last journey to Afghanistan: he dies in autumn 1983, crushed by a Soviet tank. His mujaheddin friends bury him in Urgun, with the honours reserved for martyrs.

3 Claudio Foschini | The adventurous story of a “hustler” from the Roman suburbs, from the ‘60s to the ‘90s:
poverty, prison, drugs and (failed) redemption

Rome, 1949. Claudio Foschini was born in the slums of Mandrione, to a mother who is a “scarpara” (pickpocket in Roman slang) and a father who sells newspapers at the Termini train station (“a prestigious job for the poor”). His childhood resembles that of many children from the Roman slums: Claudio grows up in poverty, but the climate of solidarity in the family and the community give hope, even joy. Neighbours help each other out and pass their days together, the group of kids play their first pranks. Then it’s time for boarding school, which is inevitable for the poorest families: it guarantees their children lunch and dinner. But being separated from his family, and the strict education at the boarding school, leave Claudio with deep wounds, and he is taken over by a desire for rebellion and revenge.
He starts robbing as if it were a game, but it doesn’t take long for him to end up in the Porta Portese juvenile correction facility. That’s when he begins a dizzying downward spiral of prison, theft, armed robberies, prison again and lots of drugs. Life alternates between in and out, more in than out, and even though he feels injustice for what he sees as his destiny, imprisonment is a moment for reflection and balance, memory and projection. Claudio fills eleven notepads telling the story of his life, honestly and authentically. He does it to help pass the time behind bars, but also to warn those youth that could be attracted by the same path to what may seem like an easier life, but that’s only illusory and never satisfying.
Writing, like doing theatre in prison, lets Claudio taste the beginning of a liberation, though it will never be complete: one morning in May 2010, at not even 61 years old, Claudio is killed by an undercover security guard in a tobacco shop during his last armed robbery.
Claudio Foschini entrusts us with his adventurous life, generously and with clear incoherence, offering an “insider” portrait of the Roman slums of that era.

4 Paule Roberta Yao | The journey of a young French woman, born in Cameroon and living in Rome, to rediscover her origins.

Marseilles, 2010. It’s the last days of the year, those holidays when even the most distant families gather and prepare to welcome what will come. Paule is 26 years old, and is going home from Italy, where she has lived for a long time, to spend New Year’s Eve with her parents and sisters. At home, the situation isn’t easy: after 36 years together and three daughters, her parents’ relationship has ended and her mother has left the house, upsetting the family balance; even the daughters have decided to live far from each other.
Paule is the first to arrive at her father’s home, and the tension is thick, movements are measured, common spaces limited. A telephone call interrupts the geometry of the rancour: Odette, the oldest sister, has passed away during the night. Paule is the one to hear the news and must first inform her father, then her mother, and finally her other sister. Disbelief, tears, pain.
The grief turns Paule’s life upside down, but it also gives her the opportunity to look inside, deal with the present and with what she wants to change. Should she stay in Marseilles with her parents, to help them through their sorrow, or move further towards herself? The answer is simple: Paule goes back to Italy, finds a job and starts therapy. From that moment, she begins to get to the root of her problems and go back over her past. Facing her mourning, she finds herself facing herself, her origins, her relationship with her immigrant parents, always “on the edge of two worlds”, in a precarious balance between the cultures of the country of arrival and the country of origin. Her parents haven’t kept strong links with Cameroon; maybe it’s Paule’s duty to rebuild them in order to rebuild herself. This is how, a few years later, again during the Christmas holidays, Paule leaves for Yaoundé, where she was born, and is welcomed by her grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins. Cameroon is an “emotional tsunami”: she realises the conditions of the family who stayed behind, their habits and values, with their privileges as European citizens, but also the arduous journey her parents had to face in order to leave, to free and rebuild themselves, while never feeling truly welcome. That journey, projected into a dimension both strange and familiar, allows Paule to complete her process of healing, awareness and reconciliation with her origins.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that Paule had decided to live in Italy, which is neither her birthplace nor where she grew up, neither Cameroon nor France, but her personal land of arrival. It’s as if it were only possible in that repeated drawing of borders to recover intimacy with her parents and herself. It’s as if it were only possible in that adopted land to be able to decide who she really wants to be, surround herself with a chosen family and not blood ties, accept her origins, be proud of them and feel strong about her identity, a dance between many worlds.

5 Caterina Minni | The fight against anorexia, told by a 14-year-old girl.

Caterina is eleven years old when she decides to stop her body from growing. She’s extremely thin, but finds herself shapeless. The supermarket shelves bring her stress and tension. She fights a battle against her mother to get food without calories and change her family’s habits, and imposes her choices onto them. At twelve years old, for more than two years, she is hospitalised in the Palazzo Francisci Residence in Todi, which is specialised in  the treatment of eating disorders. When she is released, she goes to live in a boarding school in Sansepolcro. That’s where the hardest battle starts: no longer survival, but healing, a long path full of unforeseen obstacles. It’s so hard to pierce the darkness, learn to take risks, trust yourself and others, make your soul less sharp and hard-edged, even if your body isn’t any more.
Writing is part of the path: it documents and supports it, and may even make it possible.
Because healing disorients you, it dismantles the foundations of the illness you’ve learned to  identify with, it redraws your identity with an entirely new geography, one that is no longer based on pain. Writing keeps a map of this path, so you don’t get lost nor lose sight of your goal. Unlearning pain is difficult, especially when it’s written on your body, a battlefield and enemy that must be faced with weapons and no mercy. But Caterina decided to live: page after page, she entrusts her diary with her most unspeakable thoughts, and she makes a journey that is both medical and personal, clear and deep. And when she realises that she no longer envies a body that suffers more than hers, that “wins” on the scale of pain, she understands that, instead, she just may be winning.
This is a war diary, and the writing is interrupted when Caterina gets to the end of her healing journey: she identifies the exact moment when everything began and analyses the reason why she has caused herself so much suffering. Thanks to this new awareness, she can  end the battle, make peace with herself and others, and face what caused her illness.

6 Liudmila Florenta | The story of a woman who leaves Moldova and three daughters to work as a caregiver in Italy, but told by one who stayed: her now adult daughter.

Chisinau, 2016. Liudmila is 19 years old. For her classmates it’s the final days of high school, but for her it’s the beginning of a second life. She will depart for Italy in one week, where her mother is waiting for her, after leaving thirteen years ago, when Liudmila was only six.
Since then, Liudmila has seen her once, and she was already twelve. She remembers the clothes her mother wore the day she left, a red sweater and black velvet pants: “she didn’t have any other clothes, but she was beautiful”. Her mother left to provide a better future for Luidmila and her two other sisters, Liudmila knows. She imagines, in thoughtful detail, he mother’s suffering in that foreign land, but she also knows that her childhood went away with her. When Liudmila arrives in Italy, she reconsiders her age: she subtracts the years she spent far from her mother and herself, those when she felt exiled to her grandparents, because what can you consider “home”? “The place where my mother is, where love reigns!”.

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