Adelphi: The Publishing House that Defied Italian Culture
Event Details
Anna Ferrando will discuss her pioneering research on the origins of the Italian publishing house Adelphi is an innovative and promising approach to cultural and historical inquiry. Her Adelphi: Le origini di una casa editrice (1938-1994) was published by Carocci, in 2023.
Her work analyzes Italy’s post-war culture, politics, and society through the practice of selection, translation, and publication of books. At a time when Italian publishing houses, reflecting society at large, were deeply divided along political and ideological lines, Adelphi’s fierce independence stood out as unique. With vibrant prose and thought-provoking open questions, Ferrando suggests how the men and women of Adelphi shaped the tastes, filtered the knowledge, and introduced authors to generations of Italian readers. The name Adelphi— brothers in Ancient Greek— refers to philosopher and Nietzsche scholar Giorgio Colli’s idea of a “community of the elect and equals, united under the banner of culture.”
Instead of tracing Adelphi’s history back to a single founder, she explore its development as the fruit of dialogues initiated in anti-fascist circles by Luciano Foà, Roberto Bazlen, Alberto Zevi, and, from the early 1960s, Roberto Calasso.
From the very beginning, Adelphi’s catalogue shows a strong focus on Central European culture, the search for works that highlighted individual experience, the discovery of psychoanalysis through the Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard, and the publication of Nietzsche’s complete works. Many ‘unique’ books, as Bobi Bazlen defined them, surrounded and expanded these categories.
The personal archives Foà, Zevi, and other Adelphi collaborators suggest that many of these innovative choices were rooted in the years before 1962 and reflected the concerns and hopes that linked the last years of Fascism to democratic Italy. This search into the origin adds perspective to a later period in which Adelphi became increasingly identified with Roberto Calasso’s single-handed vision.
Anna Ferrando is a fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies (Columbia University )and a researcher in Contemporary History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. Her field of inquiry is the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, her main focus being cultural mediators and mediation in the 20th century. Among her publications: Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book hunters. Literary agents under Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019), awarded “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History, as editor, Stranieri all’ ombra del Duce. Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce. Translations During Fascism] (Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2019). Her most recent book is Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938-1994) [Adelphi. The origins of a publishing house (1938-1994)] (Rome, Carocci, 2023). She is currently working on media history in the Mediterranean area, specifically focusing on the relations between information, freedom of expression, political power, and diplomacy.
Image: Giorgio Colli, Fondazione Giorgio Colli
