For over sixty years, spurred by the passion for knowledge and an adventurous spirit nourished of vast culture and love for the world and far off civilizations, Fosco Maraini tirelessly explores the remotest corners of the world meeting and allowing us to meet even the farthest cultures and making us discover in them the fundamental roots of our culture and of mankind.

Refined narrator, scholar supported by vast knowledge lived with love, extreme representative of that species of great ethnologists-travelers now very rare, anthropologist and writer, poet on the page and in photography, Fosco Maraini has ventured along difficult and hidden roads, he has gone to the discovery of spiritual continents like Tibet or Japan, making them revive and understood from inside and making them become landscapes of our soul. With an extraordinary spiritual opening, cultural and scientific originality and physical and moral courage, Fosco Maraini has taught and teaches us how to feel at home everywhere in the world, to perceive far off and different people and civilizations as ours in a brotherly way. We cannot define him better than using his own words:

“A man that does not belong to any culture but who loves them all”.

The prize is delivered by Claudio Magris