From Friday 22 April at Palazzo Mauri an exhibition celebrating the prestigious award

An exhibition at the “Carducci” library, open to the public from Friday 22 April, celebrates the Pulitzer Prize with a selection of works to which the prestigious award was given and with various documents and materials. The winners of the prize – which is usually announced in April and celebrates its one hundred and fifth anniversary this year – include authors such as Wilder, Steinbeck, Hemingway and Roth. Among the great names, the creator of the Festival Of Two Worlds, Gian Carlo Menotti, also stands out.

The famous composer is one of the few personalities to have won the Pulitzer Prize for music twice, in 1950 with “The Consul” and in 1955 with “The Saint of Bleecker Street“. These two operas will be presented with programmes, press notes, CDs, cards and critical essays referring to the various performances held in different editions of the Festival Of Two Worlds.

The exhibition at Palazzo Mauri also displays twenty or so literary works available at the “Carducci” library that have made the history of this important prize, instituted in 1917 by the Hungarian-born publisher and journalist Joseph Pulitzer at Columbia University in New York, which over time became the prize par excellence for journalism but soon rose to prominence for literature and music as well. Often praised and admired, sometimes criticised and not without controversy, including that of being excessively American-centric, the prize’s roll of honour nevertheless provides an admirable cross-section of the aesthetic-literary trends and socio-cultural processes that have affected Western society.