The itinerary proposed by Roberto Cicala in “Andare per i luoghi dell’editoria”, published by Mulino, also passes through Lake Maggiore. It will be the focus of the meeting on Saturday 29 June at 6:30 pm in Verbania Pallanza, in the spaces of the Spalavera bookshop in via Ruga 15, with Andrea Cassina, director of the Ceretti library, who will talk with the author, professor at the Catholic University of Milan and editor of Interlinea, contributor to magazines and newspapers with several books to his credit, including I meccanica dell’editoria and anthologies of Rodari, Rebora and Vassalli.
Cicala recalls in the book that “Arnoldo Mondadori loved to host his greatest writers in Villa Verbanella in Meina, collecting the signatures of those who passed by on the white fireplace, from Ungaretti to Buzzati, from Disney to Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway”. The book mentions a day spent by the publisher, in competition with Einaudi, hunting for the author of A Farewell to Arms, “finally met, spotting a lookalike of the writer during a Miss Italia selection, right where he had set the final pages of the novel, at the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées in Stresa. In the end, in the villa in Meina (recently purchased by Donatella Versace), Hemingway had given an interview to only one journalist, Eugenio Montale, and had said to Alberto: “Call me Mister. Dad””. Cicala adds, reporting a memory from Luca Formenton that “from that same terrace, later covered, the Mondadori family had seen the red sky of bombed Milan in August 1943, when the offices were to be moved to Arona, to Villa Ponti”.
“The idea of the volume is to discover the places where those books we love are born” announces the author, one of the major publishing experts in Italy, where he is presenting the book on a tour that will see stops in Trieste, Padua, Palermo and Bari in the coming weeks, after the preview at the recent Turin Book Fair with exceptional testimonials such as Giuseppe Laterza, Giovanni Hoepli and Irene Enriques of Zanichelli, as well as Daniela Bonato, curator of the series “Ritrovare l’Italia” which with this title Andare per i luoghi dell’editoria celebrates 70 years of history.
Publishing houses are places where there are no guided tours, which you can do in these pages to discover where the books we love are born thanks to the meeting of people, ideas, stories and emotions. From the lagoon districts of Manutius to the galleries of the historic center of Milan, from the mass of Turin books between Gobetti, Einaudi and Don Bosco to the Bologna of Zanichelli and del Mulino (which turns 70 in 2024) and up to the Florence of the cafés chosen by poets to the editorial meetings, and again from the Rome of politics and sanctity to the Naples of the stalls, to the Latertian Bari and the Palermo of “Memory” is a behind-the-scenes itinerary of the best seller factories including offices, villas, open spaces and bookshops. A volume that was missing with a map of how and why so much knowledge is produced throughout the peninsula: it is a bibliodiversity that reflects the varied identity of Italy today, of which publishing houses are a truthful mirror between paper and digital.
