The Vittoriale Award goes to Brunello Cucinelli

For the first time the Vittoriale Prize is awarded to an entrepreneur. A choice with which President Giordano Bruno Guerri, together with the Board of Directors of the Vittoriale degli Italiani Foundation, want to “pay homage to a figure who was able to make culture and beauty the cornerstones of his vision”. “Through the recovery of symbolic places, the promotion of cultural initiatives and the valorisation of knowledge, Brunello Cucinelli has established himself as one of the most authoritative contemporary interpreters of an Italian tradition in which business, art and thought feed each other”, explains Guerri.

The Award, represented by a sculpture created by Mimmo Paladino, will be presented by President Guerri to Brunello Cucinelli on Thursday 9 July, at 9.00 pm, on the Nave Puglia del Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera (Brescia), in a meeting-interview open to the public. The backdrop to the evening will be the lake and the Mausoleum, recently restored and illuminated, in a setting of great beauty.

“Brunello Cucinelli managed to demonstrate that beauty can be a principle of action and not just an ideal to contemplate. He built a great business without ever separating it from culture, from the love of books, from the care of landscapes and from respect for history. Gabriele d’Annunzio knew that beauty is a force that transforms the world; Cucinelli, in our time, has been able to translate this idea into concrete works, places and gestures. This is why Vittoriale considers him one of the most significant contemporary interpreters of that Italian humanism that continues to speak to the future”, wrote President Guerri in the motivation.

The Vittoriale Prize – awarded by the Foundation to leading personalities in the most disparate fields of knowledge who have left, and continue to leave, an important trace of their work – has so far been awarded to Ermanno Olmi, Paolo Conte, Umberto Veronesi, Giorgio Albertazzi, Alberto Arbasino, Ida Magli, Riccardo Muti, Piero Angela, Samantha Cristoforetti, Marco Bellocchio, Sergio Castellitto, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, Mario Botta, Nicola Crocetti, Vasco Rossi and Francesco Tullio-Altan. (by Paolo Martini)