L'INVENTORE DI LIBRI

The life and genious of the inventor of modern books, Aldo Manuzio, the steps of his extraordinary career in the evocative setting of the city that made it all possible: Venice.

Aldo Manuzio was the first true publisher in history: he created the modern publishing industry, he invented the cursive character, the index and the title page, and above all he was the first to conceive reading as entertainment. Born in Bassiano, in Lazio, he passed through Ferrara and Carpi, where he was a preceptor of the Pio princes, and arrived in Venice in his forties at the beginning of the 1490s. In those years, the city was the undisputed European capital of printed books so from a simple preceptor, Manuzio became a publisher. The beginning of his career is influenced by his humanist education: he publishers grammars and Greek texts to learn the classical language. But in 1501 he set in motion a revolution that extends to the present day: by using the smaller book formats, until then reserved for religious texts, to print works in Latin and vernacular. The pocketbook was born. This new format encourages a new form of reading, silent reading: reading used to be a necessity and books were always read aloud, but now, with Manuzio's pocketbooks, people discovered the pleasure to devote themselves to reading in intimacy. Together with his friend Pietro Bembo, Manuzio introduces in the Italian vernacular the punctuation marks formerly used solely in ancient Greek: accents, apostrophes, and the semicolon. When he died in 1515, the world of books had definitely changed. Beyond paper and ink, everything that defines books as we know them today, we owe to him, even after half a millennium. Alessandro Marzo Magno was born in Venice and works in Milan. He has published a number of history books, including L'alba dei libri. Quando Venezia ha fatto leggere il mondo (Garzanti, 2012); Missione grande bellezza. Gli eroi e le eroine che salvarono i capolavori italiani saccheggiati da Napoleone e a Hitler (Garanti, 2017), Il ricettario di casa Svevo (La Nave di Teseo, 2018) and La splendida Venezia (Laterza, 2019).