The article provides a summary of the history of the book in Italy from the Renaissance to our own times which, instead of being merely celebratory, or self-celebratory of the “lights”, as is usual with much writing in this field, looks rather into the “shadows”. What emerges is a picture of Renaissance publishing perpetually balanced on a knife-edge between success and failure, as is shown by the almost eighty centres in which printing appears in the Fifteenth century, as well as the over seventy centres from which printing duly disappears. The article identifies three main phases in the growth of Renaissance typography: first, the appearance of printing as mechanised writing in many cities in the Fifteenth century; second, the development of a genuine publishing industry, as a system based on advancing money, in the Sixteenth century; and third, from the end of the Sixteenth century, a new expansion of printing as a service industry catering for the needs of the local community. The subsequent decline of Italian publishing, visible already at the beginning of the Seventeenth century, is examined in the context of political and economic shifts in Europe, but some important factors in internal and religious policy are also noticed, in particular the prohibition of the Bible in Italian, which had an important knock-on effect for reading practices. In the following centuries further symptoms of Italian backwardness are the failure to take root of the circulating library and the limited success of the novel, while the modern market is hampered by the fact that for many Italian is a “foreign” language.
