When Marguerite and Alberto met with the Ecclis, Clotilde, and Cesare Servi at Giggetto’s for spring lamb, table talk centered on the most probable candidates for the coming Strega prize. The names of several writers, among them Massimo’s, were mentioned.

“I’ve read the manuscript of Bontelli’s new book,” Marguerite told Servi, “and I’m going to send it on to an American publisher with the translation of a chapter or two. What do you think of him?”

“Very fresh and amusing—not much substance, of course, but that’s not his style.”

“He’s something new in Italy, a real humorist. And he’s unashamedly easy reading. I think Bontelli should get the prize for just being himself. Everyone else is so predictable and bland. The prizes themselves do that; they condition young writers to write in safe formulas.”

“We didn’t invent the literary prize, you know,” said Leone Eccli a bit defensively; he was on the jury of almost every major prize in Italy—a calling as profitable in honorariums and paid vacations for him and Aurelia as his television job. “The French had them first, and even the English and Americans preceded us. But like everything else we do, we had to make it more splendid. Now we have more than three hundred prizes, and they’ve taken the place of the courts in the duchies and city-states. That’s the only way they can be explained. Every little town and resort has its prize; jurors are like the nobility and writers take the place of courtiers vying for patronage. Instead of marriages of alliance and consolidation, there are love affairs according to which husband is on which jury and which wife has to be seduced. A very Italian phenomenon. Not at all like the British or American variety.”

“You can’t compare Italian prizes to American ones,” said Clotilde with her wise-horse air and the fame of having used Servi and others to pick up a dozen or so prizes for herself. “American writers can live from their work, they don’t need prizes, because there they publish a book in editions of ten or fifteen thousand copies. Then there is television, the movies, paperbacks. As with everything else, it’s organized over there. Translations of my books are even in paperback. It’s not like Italy, where an author would starve if he waited to sell ten thousand copies of his work.”

“No one in Italy reads,” said Leone disparagingly. “This is a country of illiterates. It has the literature it deserves.”

Marguerite leaped into the conversation with an earnest look on her face. “Build public libraries and educate the people to read! You’re publishing now for a tiny elite.”