The Bagutta Prize is an Italian literary prize that is awarded annually to Italian writers. The prize originated among patrons of Milan's Bagutta Ristorante. The writer Riccardo Bacchelli discovered the restaurant and soon he regularly gathered numerous friends who would dine there together and discuss books. They began charging fines to the person who arrived last to an appointed meal, or who failed to appear.

Carlo Emilio Gadda was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers who played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay.